Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher is credited as being the father of Christian liberalism. Like most influential Church fathers, unresolved doubts concerning the orthodoxy and doctrine of his time led him to seminary. He developed a strong sense of skepticism towards Christian theology while studying at the University in Halle. In response to the Enlightenment, Friedrich Schleiermacher shifted his thoughts towards his experience and feelings this would usher in a new era of liberal theology. No such theological doctrine had been developed within the historical context of the Christian church; it is helpful to highlight the profound challenges presented by Enlightenment philosophy in the place of religion. Liberals insisted that the ultimate authority in theology must be man, either in his reason, his will or his feelings. If only what can be proven by experiments and deductive reasoning is knowable, how could we know about unverifiable religious doctrines with any certainty? Even among those caught up in Romanticism, a reactionary movement against its cold rationalism, religious dogma and moralistic authority were still perceived as a hindrance to authentic, individual freedom. One could be cultured, optimistic, moral and full of ideals. However, religion seemed irrelevant to the progress of the human spirit. In the autumn of 1797, Schleiermacher began to be connected with a circle of young Romantic friends devoted to aesthetic, literary and philosophical interests. It was to such Berlin bohemians who were influenced by idealistic spirit of the age, rather than skeptical rationalistic materialists, that he wrote his first book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Not only was religion despised due to popular misunderstanding, his main concern was directed to clarify its essence and clear away confusions of substituting religious piety “for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs” courtesy of the Age of Reason.
[1]Thus for Schleiermacher religion is an inward and personal experience Those who have such experience can talk about it to other people so that when the universum impinges itself on them these people to whom religious people have talked about their experiences will "remember" and be able to recognize a religious intuition In this sense teachers of religion or evangelists are merely playing the proverbial "midwife," or acting as catalyst to reawaken what is already there in the individual(86 Bongmba ).
This article examines the theological implications of Schleiermacher's theory of religion in the Liberal Theology, highlighting its contemporary promise for making sense of religious diversity its effect on Philosophy and his study of Pneumatology.
Early Schleiermacher's
[2]Ethics. Next to religion and theology it was to the moral world, of which, indeed, the phenomena of religion and theology were in his systems only constituent elements, that he specially devoted himself. In his earlier essays he endeavored to point out the defects of ancient, and modern ethical thinkers, particularly of Kant and Fichte, Plato and Spinoza only finding favor in his eyes. He failed to discover in previous moral systems any necessary basis in thought, any completeness as regards the phenomena of moral action, any systematic arrangement of its parts and any clear and distinct treatment of specific moral acts and relations. His own moral system is an attempt to supply these deficiencies. It connects the moral world by a deductive process with the fundamental idea of knowledge and being; it offers a view of the entire world of human action which at all events aims at being exhaustive; it presents an arrangement of the matter of the science which tabulates its constituents after the model of the physical sciences; and it supplies a sharply defined treatment of specific moral phenomena in their relation to the fundamental idea of human life as a whole(nndb).
Schleiermacher's Pluralism
[i]Religion, for Schleiermacher, is neither the result of an ahistorical core experience that is everywhere the same nor the result of particular cultural-historical experiences that are everywhere different. Rather, religion is a dialectical phenomenon, a kind of affective existential potentiality built into human nature that only appears as already modified in various communal and linguistic shapes. This view represents a fruitful negotiation between universalism and particularism. And it has distinct methodological implications: as a Christian, Schleiermacher interprets religion via a double-visioned strategy that is both mediated by redemption in Christ and opened up to diversity. Employing the work of Charles Taylor, the article concludes by suggesting that such an approach, with supplementation, remains viable in today's religiously plural world.
[3]Schleiermacher's psychology takes as its basis the phenomenal dualism of the ego and the non-ego, and regards the life of man as the interaction of these elements with their interpenetration as its infinite destination. The dualism is therefore not absolute, and, though present in man's own constitution as composed of body and soul, is relative only even there. The ego is itself both body and soul -- the conjunction of both constitutes it; our "organization" or sense nature has its intellectual element, and our "intellect" its organic element. There is no such thing as "pure mind" or "pure body." The one general function of the ego, thought, becomes in relation to the non-ego either receptive or spontaneous action, and in both forms of action its organic, or sense, and its intellectual energies cooperate; and in relation to man, nature and the universe the ego gradually finds its true individuality by becoming a part of them, "every extension of consciousness being higher life." The specific functions of the ego, as determined by the relative predominance of sense or intellect, are either functions of the senses (or organism) or functions of the intellect. The former fall into the two classes of feelings (subjective) and perceptions (objective); the latter, according as the receptive or the spontaneous element predominates, into cognition and volition (nndb).
Schleiermacher on Pneumatology
[4]It has become fashionable for Christian theologians to complain that the Holy Spirit has been wrongly neglected, at least in the West. Simply stated, Schleiermacher sees the Spirit as mediating Christ’s new humanity to us, thereby extending Christ’s redemptive work to us. Critics might raise several objections against this proposal; I address three in this section. The first objection is that this account collapses objectivity into subjectivity, theology into anthropology, and so on. The second objection is that it compromises the freedom of the Spirit’s work, and the third is that it de-personalizes the Spirit. His study of the Holy Spirit and its activity between human activities led him to believe that. [5]By parity of reasoning, one of the marks of an adequate Pneumatology should be that it posits no gaps between the Spirit’s activity and human activity.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Liberalism not only lacks a clear or convincing vision of truth, but also lacks a clear moral system. Radical relativism dominates both. The effort to replace the Bible as authority with man as authority has been a total failure. Liberalism's weaknesses are seen in the very areas where it was attractive to many. First, liberalism has not been as successful as orthodox Christianity in providing an intellectually respectable defense of the faith. Second, it has promoted unity only by abandoning any claim to truth. Third, in its optimism it has failed to account for the undeniable evil in human nature. Liberalism has failed in its central task. It has not saved Christianity. Today the liberal churches are increasingly empty while many conservative churches are growing and vital. Many liberal theologians, have come to recognize that their expectation of the decline of religion and the steady rise of secularism was wrong.
