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Chapter 25
Romanticism’s response to
Enlightenment theology
Questions to be addressed in this
chapter
1.
2.
3.
4.
What was Lessing’s approach to religious knowledge?
What were Kant’s central contributions to theology?
How did Schleiermacher meet the challenge of modernism?
What is the relationship of doctrine to the Christian life for
Schleiermacher?
Lessing
• (1729-1781), German writer influenced by the Enlightenment.
• Believed that religious truths come through reason, not
through history. Lessing’s Ditch: we are separated from the
events of the past by the ditch of history, which can never be
crossed with certainty.
• Encouraged a deep skepticism about claims to religious
knowledge.
Kant
• (1724-1804) Professor of Philosophy in Königsberg with Pietist
upbringing.
• The chief concern of religion is morality rather than knowing
some creed. This comes through reason alone.
• Epistemological project:
o We can’t look for knowledge outside the limits of our own
experience.
o We can’t know reality itself even by experience, because our
experience itself is shaped by the categories of our minds.
• Traditional proofs of God are unsuccessful, but it is morally
necessary that we postulate God’s existence so that the wrongs
will be righted in an age to come.
Schleiermacher and the feeling of
absolute dependence
• (1768-1834) Father of modern Protestant theology.
• Raised Pietist, but desired more sophisticated theological
answers.
• Became a pastor and professor in the Reformed tradition.
• Religion is not about propositional knowledge, nor even about
morality; rather it is part of a more fundamental realm of human
experience: feeling.
• We have a feeling of absolute dependence on something other
than ourselves. This is the foundation of religion.
• This steers clear of the conflict with science, as science is a
different way of talking about the world.
• His approach to religion fitted well with the developing Romantic
movement.
Schleiermacher on miracles
“Miracle” is merely the religious name for event, every
one of which, even the most natural and usual, is a
miracle as soon as it adapts itself to the fact that the
religious view of it can be the dominant one. To me
everything is a miracle, and for me what alone is a
miracle in your mind, namely, something inexplicable
and strange, is no miracle in mine. The more religious
you would be, the more you would see miracles
everywhere; every conflict as to whether individual
events deserve to be so named only gives me the
most painful impression of how poor and inadequate
is the religious sense of the combatants (p. 435).
Doctrine and Christology from below
• Doctrines are second-order expressions of the more
fundamental feeling of dependence.
• Christianity is unique among religions because of Jesus.
• Jesus Christ is to be understood not from creedal formulations
handed down, but from our experience of what Christ has
done for us in the act of redemption.
• Christ is the perfect example, drawing others into a higher
consciousness of God.
Summary of main points
1. Lessing discounts revelation and the historic creeds of
Christianity; instead, religious truth becomes moral truth
which is discovered through reason.
2. Kant precluded theology from the realm of knowledge but
held God’s existence to be morally necessary.
3. Schleiermacher’s religion is ultimately founded on a feeling
of absolute dependence.
4. Schleiermacher relates all of doctrine to the redemption
effected by Jesus, and attempts to understand who Jesus
was “from below” by his work of redemption.