Chapter 25

1. Chapter 25 Romanticism’s response to Enlightenment theology

2. Questions to be addressed in this chapter • What was Lessing’s approach to religious knowledge? • What were Kant’s central contributions to theology? • How did Schleiermacher meet the challenge of modernism? • What is the relationship of doctrine to the Christian life for Schleiermacher?

3. Lessing • (1729-1781), German writer influenced by the Enlightenment. • Believed that religious truths come through reason, not through history. Lessing’s Ditch: we are separated from the events of the past by the ditch of history, which can never be crossed with certainty. • Encouraged a deep skepticism about claims to religious knowledge.

4. Kant • (1724-1804) Professor of Philosophy in Königsberg with Pietist upbringing. • The chief concern of religion is morality rather than knowing some creed. This comes through reason alone. • Epistemological project: • We can’t look for knowledge outside the limits of our own experience. • We can’t know reality itself even by experience, because our experience itself is shaped by the categories of our minds. • Traditional proofs of God are unsuccessful, but it is morally necessary that we postulate God’s existence so that the wrongs will be righted in an age to come.

5. Schleiermacher and the feeling of absolute dependence • (1768-1834) Father of modern Protestant theology. • Raised Pietist, but desired more sophisticated theological answers. • Became a pastor and professor in the Reformed tradition. • Religion is not about propositional knowledge, nor even about morality; rather it is part of a more fundamental realm of human experience: feeling. • We have a feeling of absolute dependence on something other than ourselves. This is the foundation of religion. • This steers clear of the conflict with science, as science is a different way of talking about the world. • His approach to religion fitted well with the developing Romantic movement.

6. Schleiermacher on miracles “Miracle” is merely the religious name for event, every one of which, even the most natural and usual, is a miracle as soon as it adapts itself to the fact that the religious view of it can be the dominant one. To me everything is a miracle, and for me what alone is a miracle in your mind, namely, something inexplicable and strange, is no miracle in mine. The more religious you would be, the more you would see miracles everywhere; every conflict as to whether individual events deserve to be so named only gives me the most painful impression of how poor and inadequate is the religious sense of the combatants (p. 435).

7. Doctrine and Christology from below • Doctrines are second-order expressions of the more fundamental feeling of dependence. • Christianity is unique among religions because of Jesus. • Jesus Christ is to be understood not from creedal formulations handed down, but from our experience of what Christ has done for us in the act of redemption. • Christ is the perfect example, drawing others into a higher consciousness of God.

8. Summary of main points • Lessing discounts revelation and the historic creeds of Christianity; instead, religious truth becomes moral truth which is discovered through reason. • Kant precluded theology from the realm of knowledge but held God’s existence to be morally necessary. • Schleiermacher’s religion is ultimately founded on a feeling of absolute dependence. • Schleiermacher relates all of doctrine to the redemption effected by Jesus, and attempts to understand who Jesus was “from below” by his work of redemption.