Friedrich Schleiermacher



Friedrich Schleiermacher

Background

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German Protestant theologian and philosopher, was born at Breslau (1768-1834). Friedrich Schleiermacher was the son of a Gottlieb Schleiermacher, who gave him his early education in the region of Moravia, where he studied Plato, Spinoza, and Kant. In 1796, he became chaplain at Charity Hospital in Berlin. Lacking the power to develop their preaching skills, he sought mental and spiritual satisfaction in the cultivated society of the city and intensive philosophical studies, beginning to build within its philosophical and religious system. It was now that Schleiermacher became known as art, literature, science and general culture. Schleiermacher set in late 1796 as a preacher in Berlin, where he became a close friend with Friedrich Von Schlegel, turning this into a sort of religious interpreter of romantic view. He became one of the first romantic partners in Berlin with Friedrich Von Schlegel. In 1804, Schleiermacher taught moral philosophy and ethics of culture, theology, New Testament and hermeneutics in Halle. He was a lecturer and professor at Halle and Berlin. Towards the end of the Enlightenment, at a time when the very possibility of theology was in question, Schleiermacher undermined a new course for the Christians that marked a new start for the modern technology. Indeed, we can say him the father of liberal theology.

Discussion

Schleiermacher's impact on modern Christian thought has been enormous. He freed theology from the burden of competing with science and placed it in an autonomous sphere of its own, namely, the analysis of human religious feeling. With Schleiermacher, the Romantic idealism of Schelling takes the form of manifestations of inferiority, religiosity, and sentiment. He is considered as one of the most genuine representatives of early Romanticism. His thinking was heavily influenced by Fichte, Spinoza, Jacobi, and Kant.

Friedrich Schleiermacher's groundbreaking work in Theology and philosophy was forged in the cultural ferment of Berlin at the convergence of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. His major works include Discourse on religion to educated people and those who despise it (1799), Monologue (1800), Critique of the moral doctrines (1803), and Christian Faith (1821).

Friedrich Schleiermacher is considered as the father of theological liberalism, adopted the Romanticism of Rousseau and focused on primarily the religion that it is a matter of doctrine but rather of feeling, intuition or experience. Life and theology became the theme of war in the Romantic and liberal church of the 1800s. Ortho-practice (practice or right living) forged orthodoxy (right doctrine). This was an overreaction to a Christian community that had been softened by the infiltration of Romanticism. Schleiermacher's ideas contributed to the failure of the nineteenth century enlightened deism, but also to the emergence of liberalism in America.

For him, traditional Christology had wasted time in discussions about the person and work of Christ, rather than the immediate experience of redemption itself. Schleiermacher wanted to scrutinize the mysteries of God and the soul, two distinct but inseparable concepts. He conducted his work as an idealist philosopher in the context of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but instead to ...