Schleiermacher - On Religion

Looking through the Logos catalog showed a very significant omission, namely the "Father of Liberal Theology", Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, who burst onto the scene with this book back in 1799.  He was a pious pastor who was in a literary circle with German Romantics who had difficulty understanding how such a progressive young man could be a churchman.  They persuaded him to write a book about it, here it is.  In many ways it is an Apology to Christianity in the language of the Enlightenment.  He quotes no biblical texts, and yet some themes are there.

A danger in just about any Apologetic writing is that you kinda go too far into the strange territory and your description of Christianity comes off as less than complete.  Many have said this about Schleiermacher.  The way he talks is fairly strange to me now, even if it was helpful for me many years ago.  I now have a knee-jerk reaction to his reduction of Religion to "feeling", and yet there are things that I think we can still hear with merit.  On thing that sticks with me is his critique of those who poo-poo individual religion in the name of some artificial constructed thing that tries to encompass all religions.

This natural religion, then, does not unite its religious elements by one definite view and is no definite religious form, no proper individual representation of religion. Those who profess it have in its territory no definite dwelling, but are strangers whose home, if indeed they have any, must be elsewhere. They remind one of the thin and dispersed mass said to float between the worlds, which is here attracted by one and there by another, but not enough by any to be swept into its rotation.

Schleiermacher, F. D. E. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (232–233).

Whatever you think of him, he is a significant figure in Modern Church History, and his text is valuable.

This particular text is a hodgepodge.  I originally saw that it was on CCEL and just wanted a quick port over to docx.  But the CCEL version lacks the introduction from the original, even if it included references to it in the index.  So I ported over the introduction from Archive.org and Google Books (some of each). To get consistant page numbers, I did re-number the Forward supplied by CCEL.  In the 3rd German Edition, Schleiermacher included some Explaination notes to various parts of the text.  Following CCEL, they are footnotes in this.  Some are quite long - longer than can be shown in Logos 4.3.  From what I have seen of the Beta of 4.5, it includes a reading view that should be able to show these footnotes.

Converting the explaination to footnotes has the disadvantage of changing what page they are on.  I have not redone the index from the printed version, and so some page references go to nothing,

As a side note, I think that Scholarship of Islam has advanced beyond what is mentioned in the Introduction...

SDG

Ken McGuire