Taste for the Infinite

If God is not dead, how can man prove that he lives? Rational proofs cannot convince the skeptic; the Bible alone is authority only to the convinced believer; the demythologized universe no longer points to an unseen creator. One approach to an answer that appeals more and more to modern Protestant thinkers is the undeniable evidence of religious experience--the intuition men have of their dependence upon God. The popularity of this insight, in turn, leads back to the study of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the theologian who first developed it as a basis of Christian faith. After a generation of neglect, Schleiermacher, who died in 1834, is now being reassessed as the most significant Protestant theologian since Luther and Calvin. Last week Vanderbilt University sponsored a four-day conference commemorating the bicentenary of Schleiermacher's birth.

The son of a Prussian army chaplain, Schleiermacher studied theology and philosophy at the University of Halle, was ordained a Reformed minister. After serving as a hospital chaplain, and pastor of churches in Bavaria and Pomerania, in 1810 he was named head of the University of Berlin's theology faculty, a post he held until his death. A product of both the Enlightenment and Germany's Romantic revival, Schleiermacher saw clearly that the traditional bases for faith in God were gradually being eroded by man's intellectual advances. Rationalist historians had begun to cast doubt on the authenticity of Scripture; scientific discoveries made the hypothesis of a creator God seem less and less necessary.

Purest Religion. In his best-known work, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), Schleiermacher answered that faith is not based on doctrine or reason but upon man's "feeling of absolute dependence" and what he called "a sense and taste for the Infinite." Man, he argued, could never define or explain God, only his own experience of the divine. To Schleiermacher, church doctrines were primarily articulations of religious feelings, and he scandalized German Protestantism in his early writings by coolly appraising Christianity not as a faith with a unique monopoly on truth but simply as "the highest and purest" of the world's many religions. Skirting the question of Christ's divinity, he defined Jesus as "the completion of the creation of man."

Schleiermacher fell into theological disfavor after World War I, largely because of the neo-Orthodox revolt against religious liberalism led by Switzerland's Karl Barth. In Barth's view, Schleiermacher had turned theology into anthropology by starting with man's experience rather than the divine imperative of the Bible and God's objective revelation in Christ. Not all thinkers who followed in Barth's wake agreed. The late Paul Tillich argued for the existence of God as an inwardly felt "ground of being," and readily acknowledged his debt to Schleiermacher.

Passional Approach. Today an increasing number of U.S. Protestant thinkers regard Barth as somewhat old hat and Schleiermacher as much more of a living force. University of Chicago Theologian Langdon Gilkey notes that "when students come across him, they say, 'This is a guy who can help me.' Students tend to come alive with Schleiermacher." The most obvious reason for the revival of interest in his work is that the "passional" experience of religion--as Schleiermacher called it--makes more sense to modern man than a purely intellectual one.

There are several other major theological questions that Schleiermacher made pioneering attempts to answer. As one of the first thinkers to study the cultural setting of Biblical writings, he was the forerunner of modern critical scholarship on Scripture. Convinced that denominationalism had outlived its usefulness, he was an embryonic ecumenist and worked to achieve a merger between Germany's Reformed and Lutheran churches. "People are learning," says Schubert Ogden of Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology, "that Schleiermacher was the first great theologian to articulate a reinterpretation of Christian tradition in reference to modern life."

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