The impact of Constantine on Christianity can be summarized fairly quickly: during the thirty years of his reign, more change took place in the status, structure, and beliefs of the Christian Church than during any previous period of its history. In 306, when Constantine was first elevated by his father’s troops, the imperial government was in the middle of a concerted effort to remove all traces of Christian presence from the empire. When he died in 337, Christian leaders had assumed the rank, dress, and, increasingly, the duties of the old civic elite. Before the century ended, the tables were turned completely, with traditional sacrifices outlawed and the old state cults forbidden. But Constantine’s role in bringing about this reversal is more problematic. At one time, the only question that needed to be asked about that role was how “sincere” Constantine’s conversion had been. Was he in truth a pious son of the church, or was he rather a political mastermind who seized on the power he could gain by subordinating this well-organized and doctrinaire group to his will? Admirers pointed to the enormous powers and benefactions he bestowed upon the church, the Christian character of his laws, and his suppression of pagan cults. Those who argued the opposite pointed disdainfully at the continued presence of pagan images on his coins for some time after 312, his unwillingness to use any but the most general terms for deity in his public utterances, and, most damningly of all, evidence that he not only permitted the old cults to survive but even actively patronized them, at least on occasion.

INTRODUCTION

The art of interpreting Plato, according to F. D. E. Schleiermacher, consists in two things: that Plato be viewed as an artist, and that the interpreter be an artist as well as a scholar. This twofold guiding principle is easily recognizable as “romantic,” and indeed many commentators have referred to Schleiermacher's view of Plato as “romantic.” Yet the term “romantic,” however accurate, is not in itself adequate in describing Schleiermacher's interpretation of Plato. The problem, of course, is that “romantic interpretation” carries many different meanings. Often it is taken to refer to a divinatory method of interpretation that imposes an ideal type irrespective of historical evidence; yet Schleiermacher was quite critical of such an approach. Moreover, a simple appeal to the term “romantic” overlooks the fact that there are many different “romantic” interpretations of Plato, among which Schleiermacher's was one, albeit arguably the most distinctive and influential. Finally, the modifier “romantic” eclipses the very important fact that Schleiermacher's interpretation of Plato is thoroughly “modern” - if not exactly the first modern interpretation, surely the most authoritative. It is its modern quality, inseparable from its romantic elements, that marked it as a watershed in the history of Plato interpretation. In short, nomenclature can never be an adequate substitute for a more substantive explanation, especially when we are speaking of two thinkers of the magnitude of Plato and Schleiermacher. I propose, therefore, that we examine what effect Schleiermacher's view of Plato as artist (and of himself as artist) actually had on his translation and interpretation of Plato. One important thing to keep in mind is that, for Schleiermacher, art and scholarship are inseparable.

THE QUESTION CONFRONTING SCHLEIERMACHER

How should religion relate to culture? Schleiermacher's famous book, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), presents an epoch-making answer to this question, which I will analyze and interpret in some detail in this chapter. In so doing, I will focus on tensions between Schleiermacher's stress on the relative and culturally conditioned character of historical religions and his attempt in the Speeches to identify what is common to all religions. I will also consider whether or not Schleiermacher's understanding of Christian revelation enters into his evaluation of religion in relation to culture within the context of his contribution to comparative religion. Finally, I will briefly assess the role of culture, in particular that of the arts, in fostering spirituality. I begin with some notes about the meaning of “culture” in Schleiermacher's time, and then I proceed to its relation to religion.

The term “culture” (Kultur in German) refers originally to the sphere of agriculture and husbandry, where one cultivates plants and animals in order to improve them or make them better. By extension to the human realm, a cultured person is one who has improved herself or himself by developing the highest capacities of the mind or talents. In both domains of meaning, culture is an achievement of human purposiveness, which transforms what is given naturally according to the refined and reflected value of goodness.

When compared to the intense study of his theological and philosophical works, Schleiermacher's contributions to exegetical theology have enjoyed relatively little scholarly attention. One reason might be the towering status of the theological works, the Christian Faith and Brief Outline, as well as the philosophical texts, the Dialectic and the Hermeneutics, works which have dwarfed Schleiermacher's own detailed interpretations of specific New Testament books and passages. Another reason might be the cool reception of his published exegetical works. Soon after his death, critical voices raised concern about Schleiermacher's imposition of dogmatic categories onto his hermeneutical efforts. Yet another reason might be the small number of exegetical works chosen for publication in Reimer's Sämtliche Werke or in the current Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Although Schleiermacher lectured almost every semester on the New Testament between 1804 and 1834, only a fraction of his exegetical works have been published.

In spite of the marginalized posthumous reception, Schleiermacher was considered to be at the forefront of New Testament scholarship in his time. In conversation with the nascent early nineteenth-century research on the Synoptics, Schleiermacher proposed a theory of Synoptic dependence resting on orally transmitted stories about Jesus prior to their redaction by the New Testament authors. In regard to I Timothy, Schleiermacher showed that the apostle Paul was not its author, thereby paving the way for critical deuteropauline scholarship. Similarly, Schleiermacher's research on the parallel structure of Colossians 1:15-20 set the literary parameters for research on this text well into the late twentieth century. Furthermore, he was the first theologian to offer public lectures on the life of Jesus, lectures which were unfortunately published in 1864, right before D. F. Strauss' devastating critique the following year. Last but not least, for the English-speaking world, Schleiermacher's Commentary on Luke was his first work to be translated into English.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was an eminent classicist, philosopher, and theologian. He is most famous for his contributions to theology, for which he is known as “the father of modern theology.” He is without doubt one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time, standing in the same rank as Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. His theological work had, and continues to have, an enormous influence, even when this influence has not always been recognized as his. It is well known that he introduced many of the ideas at the forefront of nineteenth-century German liberal Protestant theology. His influence has not been limited to liberal theology, however. Many of his insights decisively changed the understanding of the way in which the areas of theology are related to one another. For instance, the basic thrust of his argument regarding the “four natural heresies of Christianity,” has been widely accepted, as has his claim that the doctrine of the Trinity is the result of reflection on the fundamental experience of redemption in Christ and the common Spirit of the church that flows from it. Moreover, Schleiermacher's discussion of the relation of Christology to soteriology, that is, his argument that the doctrines of the person and work of Christ are inherently related (so that the “activity” of Christ cannot be separated from his “dignity”) has had an enormous impact. Whereas before Schleiermacher dogmatic textbooks tended to discuss the two topics in isolation, after him the topics were generally discussed together.

To explain the current impasse in scholarship on Schleiermacher and feminism, a key is needed. Contradictory conclusions have hindered the advance of Schleiermacher research in this area. For example, some scholars emphasize Schleiermacher's high valuation of women's moral and religious character and his 1798 “Idee zu einem Katechismus der Vernunft für edle Frauen” (KGA, I.2, 153-4). They therefore correctly deem him a friend of contemporary feminist issues. Other scholars point to his stands against the political, educational, and social liberation of women and rightly call him an opponent of women's civil rights. Most accurately, those scholars who realize that his “feminine impulses” and “anti-feminist exclusion of women from public life” are not easily separated wisely call for more research because something seems amiss.

These disparate judgments can be explained by investigating the ideas in Schleiermacher's work on which they are based. Most significant is what Schleiermacher called his “doctrine of the soul,” consisting of his analysis of how the human spirit organizes human feeling and thereby gives rise to human consciousness. Schleiermacher used male and female gender images and concepts to describe this unitive structure of human consciousness. His descriptive and prescriptive use of the same set of terms created a structural confusion in his work. The key to unraveling this structural confusion is found in Schleiermacher's “doctrine of human affections,” which included the art of the use of music to stir the affections. In this “doctrine of human affections” Schleiermacher created a set of gender images that moved beyond the restrictive gender biases of his own Prussian, Protestant, religious world.

Schleiermacher, famously, regards religious faith and theology as grounded in religious consciousness, and thus as broadly empirical. This is the source of much of the fascination of his religious thought, and also of many of the objections that have been raised against it. The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical analysis of Schleiermacher's epistemology of religion and its theological implications. In the limited space available we will concentrate on his masterpiece, the Christian Faith, looking from time to time for relevant background in other works.

RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS OBJECT

Schleiermacher has been accused of replacing God with human consciousness as the object of theology and religious thought. The charge is not exactly groundless. He himself said (in a text from the period of the Christian Faith) that “it can rightly be said that in religion everything is immediately true, since nothing at all is expressed in its individual moments except the religious person’s own state of mind” (KGA, 1.12, 136; OR, Oman, 108). An important motive for this claim is explicit in the statement: to the extent that religion does not go beyond the religious person’s own state of mind, it can hope to have the certain truth commonly ascribed to direct (“immediate”) experience of one’s own consciousness. The accusation of anthropocentrism or subjectivism thus has some relation to Schleiermacher’s focus on experience.

MODELS OF INTERPRETATION

Many of the most controversial theoretical debates of recent years in the humanities have been concerned with the relationships between text, author, and reader. What underlies the differences between those who announced the “death of the author,” on the basis of the claim that the language an author employs does not gain its meaning from the author's mental acts, and those who continued to write literary interpretation based on research into the life of the author as a means of establishing authorial intentions, is the wider question of the relationships between language, the people who employ it, and the world in which it is employed. Given the lack of any widespread consensus about how these relationships are to be conceived, it is not surprising that a great deal of controversy was generated. The controversy was deepened by the fact that decisions about the relationships also take one into fundamental philosophical questions concerning freedom and self-determination, and language and truth, in modernity.

In the early nineteenth century, Schleiermacher contributed substantially to the birth of the modern age (including some features that are oddly dubbed “post-modern” today). The foregoing chapters are designed chiefly to present accounts of certain major areas of Schleiermacher's activity. My task here is to focus on problems and prospects within contemporary Schleiermacher studies.

SCHLEIERMACHER’S SCHOLARLY IDENTITY AND ACHIEVEMENT: A SUMMARY OVERVIEW

Although Schleiermacher’s work outside theology deserves to be better known, thus far he is much more reputed for what he produced in theology, still strikingly contributive with respect to both general method and content. Of particular importance currently are the following elements. First is his thoroughgoing use of only generally applicable hermeneutical and historical–critical procedures in every area. Second is his philosophical-mindedness (while eschewing any intrusion of philosophical content anywhere, though he does occasionally “borrow” from philosophical method and content to establish a frame for concepts like “religion” and “ethics”).

It is no exaggeration to say that Christological doctrine is the heart of Christian theology. It encapsulates an understanding of God and human nature, as well as how the two relate to each other. How one understands the person and work of Christ depends in part on how one understands the human condition, how it needs to be changed, and what it would take to change it. Moreover, insofar as Christ is understood as the Logos, God's self-revelation, Christology also has implications for the doctrine of God, as well as for the doctrine of how it is that God relates to us. Insofar as a doctrine of the work of Christ has implications regarding how his work changes us and our relations to others, Christology contains the germ of Christian ethics. In the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christology plays no less a central role. As Richard R. Niebuhr has observed, Schleiermacher's theology is Christo-morphic; for him the elements of theology are grounded in the person-forming experience of being in relation to Christ and the community founded by him. Both Schleiermacher's dialogue with the orthodox Christological tradition preceding him, as well as his understanding of the work of Christ, are founded on a critical analysis of this fundamental experience and its implications. In this chapter I explore Schleiermacher's understanding of both the person and work of Christ. The chapter is divided into two main parts: in the first I treat Schleiermacher's understanding of the person of Christ, and in the second I treat his view of Christ's work.

Sin and redemption constitute the heart of Schleiermacher's understanding of Christianity. Christianity “is essentially distinguished from other such [monotheistic and teleological] faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth” (CF, § 11); “the distinctive feature of Christian piety lies in the fact that whatever alienation from God there is in the phases of our experience, we are conscious of it as an action originating in ourselves, which we call Sin; but whatever fellowship with God there is, we are conscious of it as resting upon a communication from the Redeemer, which we call Grace” (§ 63). The problem that Schleiermacher confronted was how to give an account of sin and grace after the Enlightenment, when fundamental questions about the credibility of Christian doctrines had been raised. Schleiermacher is committed to producing a dogmatics adequate to the modern world, that is, to meeting the challenge to the credibility of theology while remaining appropriate to the Christian tradition. To carry out this project Schleiermacher boldly reinterpreted traditional doctrines to establish their credibility, while seeking to show how his revisionist formulas are consistent with both the New Testament and the Protestant confessions of the sixteenth century as the criteria of appropriateness. His discussion of sin and redemption exhibits his dual commitment to revision and fidelity to the Christian (specifically, Protestant) tradition.

INTRODUCTION

On Christmas Day 1808 Friedrich Schleiermacher looked forward to his appointment as pastor of Trinity Church in Berlin, a chair in theology when the new University of Berlin opened, and his wedding. He wrote to his fiancée, “If I also came into any activity on behalf of the state, even if merely temporary, then I would really not know how to wish for more.” Schleiermacher's personal correspondence and journals are full of references to the importance for him of the state, Prussia, Germany, and politics. Wilhelm Dilthey writes of Schleiermacher, “he belongs to those great men who first found a way from their private circumstances to live for the state without an official position, without ambition for political adventure, in the sure self-confidence of the citizen. Without this self-confidence life does not appear to us to be worth living any more. And yet it is not more than a half century since these men struggled and acquired it.” Through his academic lectures and his sermons he became what we might call today a public intellectual. Schleiermacher lived in the era of the construction of the modern nation. To discuss Schleiermacher and the state means to go beyond Schleiermacher on church-state relations, and beyond the political context and implications of his theology. It means also to take up his role in envisioning a modern Prussia and a modern Germany.

In any presentation of Christian theology that aspires to be systematic, the order of topics is by no means a matter of indifference: the sense of a doctrine is, at least in part, a function of its location. Anyone who has looked into some of the leading works of Protestant dogmatics may be puzzled to find “providence,” “justification,” and “election” linked in a single discussion. At first sight, they seem to make an odd association of three theological terms that belong in different parts of a system. (“Grace,” the second term in our title, is likely to be ubiquitous in Protestant theology rather than reduced to a particular locus.) Providence has always appeared early in the order of topics, under the doctrine of God, and justification comes much later under “soteriology,” the subjective appropriation of the redemption won by Jesus Christ. The placement of election has varied. In the definitive edition of his Institutes (1559), John Calvin took the unusual step of moving the discussion of election (or predestination) from its customary attachment to the doctrine of God's providence and attached it instead to justification by faith and prayer as the principal exercise of faith; there it served to answer the question why one individual comes to faith, another doesn't. Friedrich Schleiermacher, though he placed providence and justification in their conventional systematic locations, postponed election still further than Calvin, placing it under ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church. Why, then, Schleiermacher on providence, justification, and election?