Many Things

It has often been said that so much of what we think of as “modernity” has been born out of a strong sense of disappointment. Disappointment is a strong motivator for reflection—conscious and unconscious—for the individual, corporate, and, indeed, national subject. Simply put, disappointment suggests that we were promised better things than this—or, at least, we expected better. The world is not gilded utopia like we were promised.

One needs only to look at the fallout of the French Enlightenment, the Thirty Years War, two World Wars, or even the peculiar sort of disenfranchisement felt by many Americans in a post-9/11 world to see that discussions about the role of the religious, and even particular sorts of religion—whether it be labeled confessionalism, extremism, or fundamentalism (whatever that means on any given day)—tend to always churn up in the wake of the aftermath of these sorts of widespread conflicts.

Indeed, the questions which often churn up in the wake of such conflicts pertain most particularly to what sort of god would permit, ordain, or even encourage such conflict. I put to you that this kind of disappointment is almost always a necessary characteristic of what we history of idea guys term “the Romantic turn.” As it was on September 12^th, 2001, so too was it the case in the bloody aftermath of the Thirty Years War. And in this regard, there are few public intellectuals who had greater bearing upon the theological consequences of disappointment for modernity than Friedrich Schleiermacher.  

In this essay, I want to briefly consider Schleiermacher’s Romantic turn and to suggest its enduring influence upon the culture of Christian theology and, in turn, the culture of Christian theology’s engagement with wider culture. Often labeled the “the father of modern theology,” Schleiermacher’s intellectual and social formation established the basis for his articulation of a doctrine of God, as reflected in The Christian Faith. Iexamine how the manner of Schleiermacher’s romantic turn consisted in a movement away from consideration of theology as a science in order to recast it in broadly religious terms such that it became an expressive exercise. It is my contention that Schleiermacher’s more mature emphasis upon the essence of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence led him to reframe the classical doctrine of God’s aseity entirely in terms of God’s relation to humanity rather than in terms of the divine life in se.

1. Schleiermacher as Theological Architect of Modern Feeling

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) influence upon modern theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was such that Barth declared him to be “the great Niagara Falls” to which all the theology of those two centuries was inexorably drawn.^[1] Dubbed “the Prince of the Church,” he was widely considered to be an apologist who had saved the Christian faith in the university and broader culture in the decades following his death.^[2]

As exemplified by works like Friedrich Schiller’s Lectures on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), French and German intellectuals were sent reeling in the wake of the French Revolution. The close of the Age of Confessionalization (c.1520–1680s) brought with it a broad recasting of the legitimizing structures upon which social, political, and religious systems had been established for the previous two centuries. The flux and speed at which the modern world seemed to erupt into being had a disorienting effect. Naturally, when one finds oneself disoriented, one tends to throw out one’s arm to steady oneself with something solid—and to find out what sent you spinning in the first place.

By the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a kind of romanticism took root in the places where confessionalism had most withered—somewhat scorched by the fires of the French Revolution, but not altogether gone either. In many respects, this romanticism took on the character of nostalgia. Schiller called for a return to a more dignified time of a Hellenized world—to become nourished by “the milk of a better age … beneath the distant skies of Greece”—and away from “the corruptions of his time, which everywhere encircle him.”^[3] Similarly, Novalis famously stated (1772–1801), “Whoever feels unhappy in this world … let him enter the world of books, the arts, and nature, this eternal domain which is both ancient and modern simultaneously, and let him live there in this secret church of a better world.”^[4] For Schleiermacher, the rationalistic rubbish which had so accumulated through the preceding centuries had cluttered the more pure expression of religion in its intuitive sense. It was upon this sense that Schleiermacher sought to steady himself following the disorientation of the previous centuries.

I proceed first by examining the doctrine of Aseity within its Classical and Pre-Modern context. Second, I will then attempt to briefly sketch Schleiermacher’s intellectual and social biography in order to shed light on his larger theological project as expressed in The Christian Life. Third, I will then conclude by providing a summary of Schleiermacher’s articulation of the doctrine of aseity against the backdrop of this wider project.

1. Aseity in Classical and Enlightenment Contexts

At its most essential level, the Christian doctrine of God’s aseity considers God’s perfect life in and of himself, a se.  Christian theology has historically confessed God as absolute self-sufficiency according to his triunity. Correlatively, this self-sufficiency sets God in contrast to all creaturely things as contingent beings. As Augustine observed, “God exists in the supreme sense, and the original sense, of the word. He is altogether unchangeable, and it is he who could say with full authority ‘I am who I am.’”^[5] So too observed Anselm: “He alone has of himself all that he has, while other things have nothing of themselves.”^[6] Thus the historical Christian confession that God neither derives life from himself nor is God dependent upon anything outside of himself.^[7] As the Westminster Confession of Faith stated in 1648, “God has all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them.”^[8] 

Yet, the rise of the Enlightenment brought with it remarkable philosophical challenges to the orthodox consensus of the 16th and 17th centuries. The influence of figures like Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Newton began to reframe the confessional paradigms of the previous two generations in wider theological discourse. For instance, in 1704, Samuel Clarke (1675-1729)delivered the influential Boyle Lecture, “A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.” This lecture series, named after the 17th century philosopher Robert Boyle (and endowed by the same), were intended to be a series of sermons on the relationship of Christianity and the new philosophy emerging in the late 17th century: with a particular apologetic bent “against notorious Infidels, viz., Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews, and Mahometans.”^[9] In this respect, Clarke’s lectures—both in 1704 and a second lecture given in 1705—were reflective of broader attempts to synthesize Christian thought with Newtonian metaphysics. Yet, they were not without their consequences. Notably, among his several points of departure from the confessional theology of earlier generations, Clarke spoke of God as “some one unchangeable and independent Being” and, thereby, as the foundation of all that exists apart from God in se.^[10] In Clarke’s attempt to give an apologetic for the necessity of God and, thereby, the foundation of existence itself, he sets discussion of God’s aseity in comparative terms. God is conceived of as a se in these terms in order to avoid, as an apologetic concern, the absurd notion of “an infinite succession of changeable and dependent beings.”^[11]

In this way, Clarke’s conception of God’s aseity reflects a broader movement away from a consideration of God in himself to one almost entirely defined according to its cosmological function. It became increasingly common, in other words, to pair the concept of God’s aseity with a consideration of God’s relations to the world such that, as John Webster observes, divine self-existence becomes, ironically, a dependent concept.^[12] Moreover, with Emmanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Critique of Practical Reason (1788), religion moved further away from a consideration of God in terms of rational intellectual matter—something which he argued most vociferously against in Critique of Pure Reason (1781)—and into the realm of the ethical.^[13]

Friedrich Schleiermacher faced a similar challenge to Kant of seeking a manner of speaking of religion in terms other than pure reason. Religion is not, for Schleiermacher, a form of knowledge as the rationalists and the orthodox believed. As will be shown, however, he differed from Kant in considering religion purely in terms of the ethical. It is, instead and most fundamentally, Gefühl—roughly translated “feeling:” thus, “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.”^[14]

1. Pietist to Pulpit

Friedrich Schleiermacher was born in Breslau on November 21^st, 1768, the son of a Prussian army chaplain who, around the age of fifty, experienced a kind of sequel conversion whereupon he moved his family to Halle and into a more extreme form of Moravian pietism. Schleiermacher thus attended a Moravian grammar school and, in 1785, proceeded to a Moravian seminary of the brotherhood steeped in a stiffer sort of the pietist tradition.^[15] He discovered through his reading of theology and philosophy—indeed, the kind of books which his seminary professors would undoubtedly not have approved—a growing antipathy toward the kind of religion in which he had been raised.^[16] Here he experienced a kind of romantic realization of the ”rubbish of antiquity” of his father’s religion which so cluttered the purer feeling of “the God and the immortality of [his] childhood”—though he would not recover this purer feeling of a more innocent state until later.^[17] It would seem by January of 1787, Schleiermacher found the instruction of his seminary professors entirely inadequate to deal with his growing doubts. In a letter to his father, Schleiermacher confessed,

Faith is the regalia of the Godhead, you say. Alas! dearest father, if you believe that without this faith no one can attain to salvation in the next world, nor to tranquility in this—and such, I know, is your belief—oh! then pray to God to grant it to me, for to me it is now lost. I cannot believe that he who called himself the Son of Man was the true, eternal God; I cannot believe that his death was a vicarious atonement.^[18]

Schleiermacher left the seminary and enrolled at the University of Halle.

Upon his completion of studies of Enlightenment thought at Halle, he became a private tutor for the Donah family, pursued ordination in the Reformed Church (ca. 1794) and, in 1796, became a hospital chaplain at Charité Hospital in Berlin.^[19] During this time, the bright and evidently charismatic Schleiermacher was introduced to the Wednesday society in Berlin where he met such figures as Henriette Hertz, Felix Mendelssohn, and Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel would become Schleiermacher’s roommate—a relationship which engendered a great deal of scandal upon Schlegel’s publication of the arguably pornographic and, it must be said, transparently autobiographical novel Lucinda.^[20] His intellectual and social interactions with the Romantic figures of Berlin would bear upon his theological development in important ways. For instance, Schlegel’s emphasis upon a kind of Romanticism focused upon the dualism of sexual intercourse finds remarkable parallels to the manner in which Schleiermacher describes the duality of intuition and feeling in On Religion.^[21] This influence becomes all the more confirmed when one considers Schleiermacher’s semi-anonymous defense of his roommate’s work in Confidential Letters on Schlegel’s Lucinde (1800) and his affair with Eleonore Christine Grunow, the wife of August Christian Wilhelm Grunow, a Reformed Minister in Berlin.^[22] Schleiermacher’s affair was made known and he was effectively run out of town.

In 1799, Schleiermacher left Berlin and publishes his first edition of On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. This work goes through significant revisions over time, but it seems likely that its earliest form was written with the “cultured despisers” of the Wednesday Society in mind.^[23] From 1802 to 1804, Schleiermacher pastored a Reformed church in Stolp and translated Plato on the side.^[24] He was then called to a professorship at the University of Halle where he remained until the end of the Napoleonic Era. In 1810, Wilhelm von Humbolt—a friend of Schleiermacher’s from the Wednesday society—called Schleiermacher to be the first professor of theology at the newly established University of Berlin.^[25] In many respects, Schleiermacher was faced with the challenges of modernity: to articulate and defend why theology belongs in the modern university. In 1811, he wrote his defense in A Brief Outline of the Study of Theology. Schleiermacher remained in this position until his death in 1834.^[26]

In 1817, the Church of the Prussian Union was established as a kind of merger of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. By this point, Schleiermacher was not only well established as the Chair of Theology at the new University of Berlin, but he was also a highly influential preacher at Church of the Trinity in Berlin, and a well-regarded statesman in Prussian politics.^[27] Against this backdrop, Schleiermacher published The Christian Faith (first edition ca. 1821–2; a second more revised edition ca. 1830–1; and an English translation following nearly a century later in 1928).^[28] Here we see a more mature Schleiermacher than what was present in his first lectures On Religion. The Christian Faith, in many respects, sought to demonstrate a kind of unity between Reformed and Lutheran thought—though, it must be said that Schleiermacher almost exclusively cited Lutheran scholastics. Nevertheless, The Christian Faith represents, as Nimmo observes, Schleiermacher’s conscious move away from grounding doctrinal claims directly in Scripture and using a conscious tradition of Christian theology as a basis for dogmatics.^[29] The preferred alternative, for Schleiermacher, was to ground the content of dogmatics in religious affections.^[30]

1. Aseity in Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith

In many respects, Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith develops his natal idea of the essence of religion as feeling into the more mature notion that the essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. As a secondary notion, God’s existence must therefore proceed as a necessary consequence if this feeling exists. Thus, for Schleiermacher, God’s attributes are merely beziehungen: that is, relations of God to us. So too, by extension, God’s aseity in a certain sense:  

If the feeling of absolute dependence comprises a reference to divine omnipotence, it is no longer necessary to bring out the independence of God as a special attribute. For if one remains at all true to the derivation of the word, it is, as the opposite of that dependence in which we find ourselves simply a negative attribute. . . which coincides with the scholastic ‘aseitas,’ virtually ‘existence from self.’^[31]

Though Schleiermacher would insist that God is without external determination, he nevertheless conceives of him as inseparable from “our receptive and active existence.”^[32] Thus, the “whence” to which one’s feeling of absolute dependence gestures is God, both as the “co-determinant in this feeling” and the one “to which we trace our being in such a state.”^[33] Aseity, therefore, is collapsed into his conception of omnipotence and eternity which are thus expounded almost entirely with reference to Schleiermacher’s anthropology: “any further content of the idea [the expression of the feeling of absolute dependence and God as its “whence”] must be evolved out of this fundamental import assigned to it.”^[34] Consequently, God’s aseity became framed almost entirely and inseparably in anthropological terms such that the turn to man’s feeling becomes the necessary precondition for the sense of transcendence.^[35]

V. Implications for Contemporary Theology  

Schleiermacher’s influence upon 21st Evangelicalism is much more pervasive than one might guess. Contemporary theologians continue to discuss God’s transcendent life in relation to mankind’s feeling and anthropological sense of itself, effectively reversing the analogia entis of classical theology. This is perhaps most commonly seen in certain strains of liberation theologies. Consequently, this move produces a kind of pathology in theology whereby God’s transcendent life becomes dependent upon man as a necessary precondition. Thus, questions of theodicy increasingly take on the shape of “can God as we deem he ought to be exist if evil exists?” Though this is by no means a problem merely isolated to Protestant—or, indeed, Christian—theologians.

We should not be surprised, therefore, when the god whom we have defined in terms of his relations to us resembles us—particularly at the very worst of times—fails. We most need the God who is not like us. We need the roaring lion who is awful to approach, seated on his throne, but undyingly, unwaveringly, immutably good in ways that we could never relate as mere creatures. To posit a god who is essentially like us just bigger and stronger is to present a god who is, in the final analysis, none at all—a shadow of man in all his desperation, cast upon the cave wall of solipsistic nihilism. This god is ultimately a myth: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.   

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[1] Karl Barth, “Brunners Schleiermacherbuch,” Zwischen den Zeiten,8 (1924), 62. Quoted in Zachary Purvis, “Quiet War in Germany: Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schleiermacher,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 76, no. 3 (July 2015), 371.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Keith Tribe (trans.) (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2016), 30.

[4] Novalis quoted in, T. C. W. Blanning, “The Commercialization and Sacralizationof European Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 136–7.

[5] Augustine, On Christian Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Lxxxii.

[6] Anselm, On the Fall of the Devil, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. B. Davies, G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), I. Cf. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 152.

[7]  Cf. James E. Dolezal’s helpful summary in All That is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017), 10-1.

[8] The Westminster Confession of Faith, 2.2.

[9] Boyle’s Will as contained in Robert Boyle, The Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle, ed. T. Birch (Hildesheim, G. Olms, 1966), vol. 1, 105, as cited in Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and Other Writings, ed. Ezio Vailati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), x.

[10] Clarke, 10.

[11] Clarke, 10.

[12] John Webster, “Life in and of Himself,” in God Without Measure I (NY: T&T Clark, 2018), 16

[13] Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 2.2.5.

[14] Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its cultured despisers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102. See, for instance, how this begins to be sketched out by Schleiermacher on pp. 102–114. Schleiermacher goes on to say, “metaphysics and morals see in the whole universe only humanity as the center of all relatedness, as the condition of all being and the cause of all becoming; religion wishes to see the infinite, its imprint and its manifestation, in humanity no less than in all other individual and finite forms,” 102.

[15] Ryan Glomsrud, “Church in the Modern Age” (Lecture, Westminster Seminary California, October 26, 2023).

[16] Richard Crouter provides a helpful summary of Schleiermacher’s exposure to Kant during this period in his introduction to the 1988 Cambridge Edition of On Religion, 18–20. He would later say of this period, “piety was the mother’s womb, in whose sacred darkness my young life was nourished and was prepared for a world still sealed for it. In it my spirit breathed ere it had yet found its own place in knowledge and experience. It helped me as I began to sift the faith of my fathers and to cleanse thought and feeling from the rubbish of antiquity. When the God and the immortality of my childhood vanished from my doubting eyes it remained to me.”  

[17] Ibid.

[18] See Schleiermacher’s letter to his father in B. A. Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 184), 25.

[19] Glomsrud, “Church in the Modern Age” (Lecture, Westminster Seminary California, October 26, 2023).

[20] Ibid. See also Paul T. Nimmo’s remarks in his introduction to the third edition of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2016), ix.

[21] See esp. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 112–3. E.g. “Intuition without feeling is nothing … both are therefore something only when and because they are originally one and unseparated. … That first mysterious moment that occurs in every sensory perception, before intuition and feeling have separated, where sense and its objects have, as it were, flowed into one another and become one, before both turn back to their original position … It is as fleeting and transparent as the first scent with which the dew gently caresses the waking flowers, as modest and delicate as a maidens kiss, as holy and fruitful as a nuptial embrace; indeed, not like these, but it is itself all of these,” Ibid.

[22] Glomsrud, “Church in the Modern Age” (Lecture, Westminster Seminary California, October 26, 2023).

[23] Glomsrud, Ibid. Cf. Richard Crouter’s introductory remarks.

[24] Ibid. See “Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

[25] “Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2^nd edition (DC: Catholic University of America, 2002), 739–40.

[26] Ibid.

[27] See Nimmo, “Introduction to the Third Edition,” in The Christian Faith, ix.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., x–xi.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2016), 218.

[32] Schleiermacher, 16.

[33] Ibid., 17.

[34] Ibid.

[35] See, for instance, John Webster’s discussion on aseity in its distinctly Christian contours in “Life in and of Himself,” in God Without Measure, vol. 1 (NY: T&T Clark, 2018).