A Survey Of The Thought Of Frederich Schleiermacher

Choked up about it. Good heavens. Well, I'm thankful to the

Lord that I wore a coat tonight. I knew that I had to wear a coat and a tie because nobody ever comes into Josh's pulpit not wearing a coat and a tie without hearing something about it.

But providentially there was another reason why I was supposed to wear a coat and a tie. So, I'm thankful to be here with you all tonight, and I'm grateful for the privilege of coming and worshiping with you and opening up what

I think is an important subject here and doing a little bit of historical analysis with you. It's a privilege for me.

It's an honor for me. It's a blessing for me to come to worship here, to break bread there with you all this evening.

I'm thankful to Josh for the invitation, thankful to Mike Phillips, thankful to Mike Kelly, for joining here and for bringing your congregations here together.

Those guys have been really good friends of mine for a lot of years, all three of you guys have, and the Lord has used you to encourage me and to strengthen me and to challenge me in all kinds of ways, and so it's good to come and to be a part of the worship and the work that God is doing through you guys and your congregations and your ministries as God's people come together in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ. So tonight, what I want to do, as Josh said, is to explore a little bit with you the thought and the main influence of a guy named

Frederick Schleiermacher, and again, you may not have ever heard that name, or if you have, it may have been from some obscure community college philosophy class that you took once, and maybe you wonder why in the world it matters and why you should care, and I hope to answer a little bit of that question tonight because the reality is that some of the things that this person taught have had an impact and an effect on the

Church of Jesus Christ in a not very good way that lingers and that continues to influence our thinking even today.

So tonight, what we're going to do, and I hope to do it briefly, I hope not to take an inordinate amount of time.

Mike Phillips told me I better not bore anybody to death with this talk, so if I do, then I'm really sorry, but to take a dollar tour kind of with you all of the life and the thought of the philosopher in Europe during the period of the

Enlightenment and the Romantic era and at the headwaters of what's called Protestant liberalism, who was named

Frederick Schleiermacher. Some people have called him the father of Protestant liberalism, and we'll talk about what that means and why it's important for us to understand, at least in a basic way, because again, the influence of what's known as theological liberalism and the influence of this person,

Frederick Schleiermacher, within Protestantism, within Protestant Christianity, is something that still affects us, something that still shapes the landscape of the thinking and the assumptions and even the worship and the piety of many, many people within the

Church today, and in order to understand all of that and what

Protestant theological liberalism was and is, first, we have to understand that it was a response to something that was going on during the 18th century of Western civilization in Europe.

So that's what we're going to talk about, but let me pray for us first and for our time as we set our minds to that.

Our Father in Heaven, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for the fact that you are the God who is and that you are the

God who is infinite, that you are the God who is transcendent, that you are the

Holy One, the Eternal One, the Great Uncreated One, the Self -existing Great I Am, and at the same time that you are all of that,

Father, all -powerful and all -knowing and ever -present and omniscient, Father, sovereign over all of the universe, transcendent above everything.

At the same time, you are the God who is intimately and eminently involved in your creation and in every single one of our lives.

We praise you that this is who you are. We praise you for the fact that you have revealed yourself to us.

We praise you for Christ, who is the living Word of God, and we praise you that you have disclosed to us and revealed to us in your scriptures your will, your nature, your character, your purposes, your plan of redemption, and all that you would have us to know that is true, and that is right, and that is good, and that is beautiful.

So we ask tonight that you would help us to understand certain things, and that as we explore the thoughts of people with whom we might disagree,

Father, that you would bolster up our confidence in the objective truth of the Word of God that is ours in the 66 books of the

Bibles that we all brought here tonight. And so, Father, give us clarity and give us wisdom, and Father, work within our minds and our hearts in order to grow our confidence and grow our faith in you and in your

Word. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. So like I said, we're talking about a guy named

Schleiermacher. That's a hard word to pronounce, and we're talking about a movement known as theological liberalism that he helped to spawn as a response to something that was going on in the 18th century

Western world, and that something that was going on was an intellectual, philosophical movement that dominated the

European mindset during the 18th century that was known as the Age of the

Enlightenment. Some people like to call it the Age of Reason, but we're going to refer to it,

I'm going to refer to it tonight as the Age of Enlightenment here, because that's the word that some of the major thinkers and philosophers and contributors of that age liked to use.

They liked to think of themselves as the enlightened ones who had come to understand truth in a way that the rest of the world had not yet come to know.

So the Enlightenment was a philosophical movement in Europe, began in the 18th century. Perhaps its roots can be traced to the end of the 17th century with the

Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment was a movement that was characterized by a whole range of ideas that all centered around the core idea.

They gravitated all around the core idea that the primary source of authority in this world from which all claims of truth and all structures of thought and philosophy and education and authority could all be legitimized and could all be considered valid.

The primary source of authority in the world according to Enlightenment thought was human reason, and not just human reason, but unaided human reason, autonomous human reason.

Not divine revelation anymore, which is what had been insisted upon throughout the history of the church before the

Enlightenment. Not any kind of tradition or historical foundation of morality or truth or goodness or beauty.

When we get to the Enlightenment, people started to insist that all truth claims, all philosophies, all beliefs, all systems and structures of government or of authority, all of it has to be subject to and legitimized by and validated by the primary and foundational source of authority that is unaided, autonomous human reason.

If it doesn't make good sense to human reason, then it must not be true. And that one central idea, which was a massive philosophical shift in the

Western world, that then led to all kinds of new ideas that most people simply take for granted nowadays, like the massive emphasis on empirical scientific discovery, the scientific method.

Those are good things until it's insisted that nothing that can't be demonstrated empirically, nothing that can't be observed over and over in a laboratory or under a microscope according to the scientific method, if it can't be seen that way, then it can't rationally be considered to be true.

Enlightenment thinking led to that kind of idea and other ideals, like individual liberty and the philosophical idea of fraternity, which sought to promote unity among all kinds of different peoples by minimizing differences, including religious differences, including moral and ethical distinctions.

Let's not make a big deal about those things to each his own as long as we all have unity and fraternity.

And other ideals too, like the ideal of religious tolerance and the separation of church and state, and perhaps most of all and most important at least to what we're going to talk about here tonight, the ideal that came from the

Enlightenment was this idea of questioning previously held beliefs, things that your parents and your grandparents always taught you to be true, things that were written down ages ago, the faith for one time all delivered to us.

All of that's got to be questioned now, Enlightenment thinkers said, and especially not just previously held beliefs, but especially religious beliefs.

And so that ideal, which is really more of an attitude, which characterized the heart of the

Enlightenment, was captured by this well -known and often used little

Latin phrase, sopere aude, which means dare to know. That was what

Enlightenment people wanted you to do, dare to know, and not by reading old books, but by thinking according to your own unaided reason.

Dare to know, dare to think for yourself, really is what they meant. Don't let anyone, especially not voices from the past, don't let anyone tell you what's true.

Dare to call every belief that you've ever held and assumed was true into question. That's the attitude and the spirit of the

Enlightenment, and dare to hold up your previously conceived notions of what's true to the scrutiny and the final authority of bare human reason.

See if it can pass the muster of empirical or skeptical scrutiny, and of course, none of our most deeply held beliefs can, because by the grace of the

Holy Spirit, we walk by faith, which is the assurance of things that are not seen, but that are eternal in their worth and in their significance.

And so by the Enlightenment standard, all those truths that Christians hold by faith were judged mostly just to be myth and old superstitions and naive religious beliefs that people hold on to even though they're obsolete, and now that we've become enlightened, we know that none of them are really true.

And the spirit of the Enlightenment was that people ought to have the courage to admit that really all those things that we all grew up with aren't actually true.

They're just our traditions, and they're just the myths that we have a sentimental attachment to, but we shouldn't cling to them as if they were actual truth.

We should dare to only embrace what we can truly know, which means dare to embrace is true, only that which can be rationally verified by passing it through the filters either of empiricism or skepticism or any of the other philosophical filters that were developed during the age of reason.

Dare to know, that was the that was the motto and the attitude of the Enlightenment age.

Dare to shed all of the things that can't be verified through human reason and only embrace is true the things which can be verified in these particular ways.

So listen here to the way that this attitude is explained, that the

Enlightenment mindset is explained by Immanuel Kant, who is one of the most enlightened thinkers of the

Enlightenment. This is just the opening paragraph, the opening few sentences really from a little essay that Kant wrote that's called,

What is Enlightenment? Just a little brief summary to explain what

Enlightenment meant, and here's his answer. What is Enlightenment? Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self -imposed immaturity, and immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without someone else's guidance.

Someone else meaning your pastor, someone else meeting the 1689

London Baptist Confession, someone else meaning the traditions of the past, someone else meaning the 66 books of your

Bible. Those are all outside previous voices and sources, and you should be able, you're immature,

Kant says, if your reason has to be governed by and submissive to those sources, any of them, and you should grow up and learn to use your own understanding without the guidance of any of those previous voices, and there's the essence, right?

There's the attitude. There's the the mindset of the Enlightenment that characterized the age of reason.

It's all about finding the courage and all about finding the ability to use one's own understanding without any guidance from another person or another source, and that's a sea change.

That's a massive shift philosophically, epistemologically, from the fundamental conviction that the eternal unseen

God has revealed Himself to us from outside of us, apart from our unaided human reason, that He has revealed

Himself to us in creation and in His Word, and that that, that divine revelation is itself objectively the true foundation of all true knowledge and wisdom and definitions of what is good, and what is true, and what is beautiful in this world.

That's what we used to believe, but Kant and the Enlightenment rejected all of that and said to believe anything like that, that there's an objective source outside of your unaided reason, that's just immaturity, and if you insist on believing in your

Bible as the source of your authority, then it's a self -imposed immaturity, and we need to grow up.

We need to learn to use our reason apart from anyone else's guidance. Kant goes on, he says, this immaturity is self -imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance.

So dare to know, there's that sapere aude, have the courage to use your own understanding.

This is the motto of the Enlightenment in Kant's own words. That's what it was all about, and as you might imagine, one of the chief areas then in which previously held beliefs had to be challenged, and where people were expected to use their own understanding unaided from any voices from the past, from outside guidance, one of the main areas was the arena of religious belief, because these are the things that we believe that can't be empirically validated, right, and that don't pass through the lens of skepticism.

Forget the fact that the skeptics themselves had very few things passing through their filters and ended up doubting much of everything.

Descartes came to say, I think, and therefore I am. That's all I can really know for sure is that I am a thinking thing.

Everything else might just be a hallucination or a delusion because I'm able to skeptically doubt it.

But especially when it comes to religious beliefs, right, virtually every Orthodox doctrine of the

Christian faith was challenged during the age of the Enlightenment, and many, many, many doctrines of the

Orthodox Christian faith were ultimately just dismissed as immature and unreasonable and irrational.

Now it's in the midst of all of that, that's what's going on in the 18th century in Europe, and it's in the midst of all of that that many people who cherished the institution of the church and the

Christian faith and the Christian religion, they started to feel that it was in a lot of danger, that it's in a precarious position, that it's being threatened, that it's suddenly become deeply vulnerable, the church is, the

Christian faith is. It's about to fall off the cliff. It's about to fade into obscurity because everybody around us in the culture has concluded that the core tenets and teachings of our faith are immature and are irrational, and they're dismissing it all, and we're in danger of losing it all, and so some people felt that Christianity was becoming irrelevant in the

Enlightenment age, and we can't have that, can we? What's the church to do when the spirit of the age concludes that our most deeply cherished beliefs are irrelevant, and irrational, and immature, and obsolete?

Well, for many Christians during this period of time in Europe, for many

Christians and for many churches, the answer was simple. The answer was, who cares if they think we're irrelevant?

What we have to do is to continue to do what we've always done in proclaiming the ultimate final authority of the

Word of God and calling people to repent, not just of sinful ideas that are downstream from the

Enlightenment motto, but from the motto itself, from the rebellion against the authority of God, and the objective reality of the revelation of His Word.

Repent of that, and churches did that and insisted that we have to keep doing that, and if we stop doing that, we lose the whole game.

We have to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, because that's the power of God unto salvation.

That's what the Holy Spirit uses to transform lives by renewing minds, by causing them to repent of that rebellion against God's authority, and causing them to take a stand once again upon it.

And so, of course, despite the fact that the consensus of Enlightenment thought was that the church had become irrelevant, in fact, the

Sovereign God was continuing to build His church, that the gates of hell themselves might not prevail against it, even during the age of the

Enlightenment. But here's the other side of the story. Here's the other side of the coin.

During that age, there were people within the church, within the

Protestant movement, who felt threatened by the Enlightenment conclusion that the church and Christianity were becoming more and more irrelevant, and these people felt that they had to do something about it besides what was always done.

They believed that what they needed to do was to make the church and make Christianity relevant to their culture once again.

And that's something every generation will struggle with. Every generation of the church has been tempted by this.

The world tells us we're irrelevant. How can we prove them wrong? Not by continuing to do what

God has commanded us, but by accepting their values and their definitions and their conclusions, and then trying to show them how we can conform the church in certain ways to make it fit the bill, and be relevant in that age.

Well, that's what was going on, and that's where this man named Frederick Schleiermacher comes in, and where the movement that's known as theological liberalism within Protestant Christianity, and not within the

Catholic Church, not within the Orthodox Church, but within the Protestant movement, Protestant liberalism comes in.

Liberalism was, and is, theologically speaking. We're not talking about political liberalism or cultural liberalism at all.

Very, very different things. Theological liberalism, Protestant liberalism, specifically, was and is at its heart an attempt by certain people within Protestant Christianity to try to rescue

Christianity from obscurity and from irrelevancy by demonstrating how

Christianity can be perfectly consistent with the philosophical assumptions and conclusions of the age.

And so, how it can still be profitable and important to that age, because they're afraid of losing it all together.

Now, of course, the word for that is compromise, because you can't square the genuine

Christian faith, which rests on the foundation of the final and ultimate authority of the objective revealed

Word of God. You can't square that with the Enlightenment insistence that unaided human reason is the only and final ultimate authority.

Those two things cannot go together. But a lot of Christian people tried to do it at the height of the

Enlightenment age, people like Frederick Schleiermacher. So, who is this guy? Frederick Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born

November 21st, 1768, in the city of Breslau, in what was then known as Prussia, now known as Poland.

His father, Gottlieb Schleiermacher, was a minister in the Reformed Church in Prussia, in Poland, and he served as a chaplain for the

Prussian army. And Gottlieb, the father, had been greatly influenced by the

Moravian Brethren, if you know anything about them. They were a pietistic group of Christians with Lutheran roots to their theology.

And so, what that means that they were pietistic isn't just that they were interested in being pious, we all ought to be as Christians, but this group took things a little further.

They tended to downplay the importance of teaching doctrine, tended to downplay the importance of doctrinal orthodoxy.

They didn't deny it altogether. They knew it was important to be orthodox, especially in terms of the essentials and the distinctive teachings of their

Protestant heritage, but they tended to emphasize practice over teaching, praxis over dogma.

They tended to emphasize things like fellowship and unity and service rather than, especially, creedal statements of Christian doctrine.

So, they did appreciate some of the creeds. They appreciated, especially, the ecumenical creeds like the

Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. And they were Lutheran in their roots, so they also appreciated and recognized the

Augsburg Confession and Luther's Shorter Catechism and statements of doctrine like that. They saw them as helpful ways of formulating and expressing

Christian truth, but they didn't really care too much if people ever read them or understood them, and they didn't spend very much time in their churches teaching them or emphasizing them, and they certainly didn't require anybody to say,

I adhere to any of them, even the ecumenical creeds, even just the Nicene Creed or the

Apostles' Creed. You didn't need to adhere to any of that or any of the basic statements of Christian doctrines contained in those ecumenical creeds in order to be a member of a

Moravian church. They were much more focused on individual personal piety and devotion to Christ, and it didn't matter so much what you believed or didn't believe or whether you had much of any theology straight.

They weren't interested in preaching and teaching the Christian doctrines as much. They emphasized how to live peaceable, productive, morally upright lives mostly, more so, certainly, than the distinctive doctrines of the

Christian faith or even the gospel. So, Schleiermacher's father, Gottlieb, was greatly influenced by this group, this

Moravian group, and by the spirit of their pietism in general, and the family ended up converting to the

Moravian Brethren from the Prussian Reformed Church, and so Frederick ended up, even as he grew up and became older, even going to the

Moravian College and Seminary to be trained to go into ministry in the

Moravian churches. So, it's not too surprising, maybe, that somewhere in that time frame,

Frederick Schleiermacher, the son, started to question certain key fundamental doctrines of the

Protestant Christian faith. To the degree that his father almost disowned him when

Frederick wrote a letter home to dad from the Moravian Seminary, he wrote a letter home to tell his father how skeptical he was about the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

He thought, this doesn't make any sense, he thought it was questionable at best to say that the blameless person of Jesus suffered the wrath of a holy

God on behalf of guilty sinners. He couldn't fit that together in his mind or understanding at all.

Didn't seem right, didn't seem just, didn't seem rational or reasonable to him at all. So, the point is, see, that with doctrine being downplayed to the degree that it was in the pietistic

Moravian system that this family had converted to, and with the spirit of the

Enlightenment in full force in Europe, Frederick Schleiermacher's thinking started to become pretty tainted by skepticism.

Eventually, he went to the University of Halle in Germany. He studied philosophy there.

He encountered the writings of Immanuel Kant there and became very, very enamored of him and influenced by Kant's deep, deep skepticism, and with that general dare -to -know attitude of the

Enlightenment. Eventually, Schleiermacher would be appointed a preacher for the

Reformed Church in Berlin in 1794, and during that time period, he started to read more, and he became influenced by the writings and the teachings of the

Romantic Movement. In 1799, having been influenced by all of that and shaped by all of those trajectories of thought, in 1799,

Frederick Schleiermacher published a work that was called Religion, speeches to its cultured despisers, cultured despisers, and in this little book that he wrote, he tried to make an appeal in defense of religion in general, not just Protestant Christianity, but a defense of religion in general to the educated class of his day.

He called them cultured despisers. They're cultured, they're erudite, they're learned, they're highly educated, they're very philosophical, they're full of this

Enlightenment thinking that considers unaided human reason to be the ultimate authority.

They're saying dare to know and dismiss everything you've always believed and hold it up to the scrutiny and and get rid of any of it that you can't prove or demonstrate empirically or skeptically or whatever, right?

So they'd become skeptical of Christianity, become skeptical of religion, and some of them despised religion.

It doesn't fit. They were the cultured despisers, and Schleiermacher wanted to make a defense of religion to them and show them how even according to all of their cultured and erudite conclusions and learnedness, we could demonstrate that religion plays an important place and has an important role.

So these were people who were critiquing religion. They were especially critiquing Christianity, which of course was most prominent in Europe at the time.

They concluded Christianity was nothing more than just a dead orthodoxy.

It's old musty statements of doctrine that have no relevance anymore, and it's just cold and just dead.

We don't need it anymore. It's just a system of control, a lot of them said very skeptically.

It's just an old authoritarian system of moralism that bishops and priests like to lord over people in order to keep them in order.

It stifles individual freedom. Christianity is just a bunch of stuffy old religious guys telling everybody what to believe and telling everybody how to live, and none of that's good for the

Enlightenment culture and for people who all just need to express their own personal beliefs and passions.

So Schleiermacher wanted to persuade the educated class, these cultured despisers of religion, that they were wrong, and that religion in general, and in particular

Christianity, weren't incompatible at all with the enlightened romantic atmosphere of the day.

So see, in this little work, his speeches to the cultured despisers, he wasn't trying at all to challenge the foundation of Enlightenment thinking, to say this idea that you've got of the authority of unaided human reason is off -base, and you should reconsider.

He wasn't trying to challenge it at all. In fact, he had come to assume it himself. He fully and happily embraced the

Enlightenment disdain for tradition and the emphases on individuality and autonomous reason and the idea that nature equals freedom for the individual.

He didn't write this little work, speeches, to critique any of that. He just wanted to try and demonstrate a version of religion and a version of Christianity that he thought would fit right in with that spirit of the age and be compatible with it.

Now, not to get off on a tangent, but that's exactly what we do, isn't it?

The spirit of the age says, your church is irrelevant if it teaches this and doesn't affirm this, and we say, well, we don't want to be irrelevant.

We want people to still come to our churches. We don't want to be made out to be bigots in the newspaper for teaching this or doing that.

So let us show you how we can be compatible with the spirit of our age.

It's a temptation that every age has struggled with, and the church in every age has struggled with. So here's how it worked for Schleiermacher.

In his speeches, he defines religion in terms that he thought these educated, enlightened romantics could relate to and identify with.

So this is where it gets a little heady, but he says religion in its essence is a sense and a taste for the infinite.

That sounds good, right? That sounds romantic, right? That's exactly what it is, literally.

A sense and a taste for the infinite, and that definition became the foundation for his theological method, the way he thinks about and does theology.

Everything else grows out of that. He contended that religion is fundamentally based on, not outside objective revelation, but fundamentally based on personal feelings and intuitions, not first and foremost doctrinal affirmations, not even first and foremost divine revelation in the

Word of God. Personal feelings is the foundation. Here's how

Keith Clements, who's one of his biographers, sums it up. He says, to seek and to find the infinite and eternal factor in all that lives and moves, all growth, all change, all action, all passion, and to have and to know life itself only in immediate feeling, that is the essence of religion.

The word that Schleiermacher very famously used for that feeling, that sense and taste and passion for the infinite, and our dependence on the infinite as finite creatures, the word that he uses is the

German word Gefühle. Gefühle, which just means feeling, but he didn't mean it in general.

He meant it in this specific way. So, he equates that sense, that feeling of a mysterious sensation of the infinite that's all around us.

He equates that sensation with what he calls piety. He believed that the feeling, the

Gefühle, was fundamental and universal to all human experience. Every human being has this, every human being experiences it, and so he believed that it couldn't be reduced to some other aspect of human nature like reason or like conscience.

He says, this is a separate deal. Piety is a separate aspect of humanness, as it's rooted in this kind of feeling and experience that we have.

So, he understood piety as the feeling that we get from the realization of utter dependence that we have when we contemplate the unknowable infinite.

Something so much greater than us, like Kant said, that it's completely unknowable, constrains us on an emotional level to feel dependent upon that greater essence, and that is the essence of piety, that feeling, that sensation, and he says that's what gives rise to religion in the same way that reason gives rise to science, and in the same way that conscience gives rise to morality.

So, he would say that the third and equally essential aspect of humanness is this sense and this taste for the infinite that generates a feeling of dependence that yields to what he calls piety, and then gives rise to religious expression and religious devotion.

Here's his words. Piety, this is Schleiermacher, piety presents itself to you as the necessary and indispensable third to science and morality.

See, during the Enlightenment, even during the Romantic Age, everybody maintained that we need science, and we need morality, that there is human reason, that there is conscience that gives rise to science and morality.

He's just saying that there's a third part to us, too, that's equally essential to humanness universally, and that's this sense of piety that gives rise to religious expression.

So, it's a necessary and indispensable third. It's their natural counterpart, one no less endowed with that dignity and excellence with what you attribute to them.

So, he's arguing to the educated class of Enlightenment thinkers and the culture despisers of religion that there is a fundamental experience in human nature that necessitates religious expression, and he's rooting all of that in the human experience, the subjective human experience.

So, knowledge, conscience, piety, those are his three distinct, but fundamentally interconnected aspects of human existence that produce, then, the three enterprises of science and morality or ethics and religion, all of which are essential to human culture, human experience.

This is how he argued to the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, and he argues it, see, from the exact same foundation of the

Enlightenment thinkers of his day. He accepts their conclusions.

He concedes the high ground and says, you've won the philosophical debate. Now, I will play according to your rules, and I will argue according to your terms to show you how religion and Christianity are relevant to your system of thought.

When, in fact, the system of thought itself was corrupt and rebellious against God's authority.

So, Enlightenment rationalism had started to say religion is irrelevant to the modern man because it's incompatible.

It's incompatible with science, incompatible with reason, but Schleiermacher argued at the very outset religion waives all claims to anything belonging to the two domains of science and morality.

They're separate. They're separate. Religion doesn't need to agree with science.

It doesn't even need to agree with morality. Science could roam free from any imposed boundaries of religion.

They're separate endeavors, and so, in the same way, he wants the cultured despisers of religion to recognize that religion's its own separate entity.

It doesn't need to be subsumed under science or ethics or morality. But even though they're distinct, religion, which is piety, which is essentially feeling, can never be completely divorced from science, which is knowing, or morality, which ultimately for him was doing.

And this is how he summed it all up going together. We do all these things, right? We know, we feel, and we do, and somehow they're all connected.

All of culture, Schleiermacher says, has to rest at least to some extent on piety, on what we feel, because culture presupposes a unity.

It presupposes a wholeness of reality, and the inner consciousness of that unity, that's what's at the core of piety.

Here's how Keith Clements explains it. Though there is some degree of separation and distinction between knowledge, morality, and piety,

Schleiermacher is claiming that at some level, to some extent, they do depend on one another.

You can be pious and ignorant, but you can't be falsely knowledgeable and be pious.

In the same way, you can't be truly scientific without being to some degree pious, consciously aware of your dependence as a finite being on the infinite other that is

God. The rejection of religion and piety is why, he explains, people have noticed that there are many knowledgeable people who are immoral, who are unethical.

It's because piety is the missing link. So if, like Kant says, we have to have morality and religion's important to us,

Schleiermacher says, yeah, this is why. Without religion, we can't have morality.

Without morality, we can't have society. Culture rests on piety to that degree, because culture assumes and presupposes this transcendent unity of reality, and the inner consciousness of that unity is what he calls piety.

That's his model. So, what that means is he distinguishes piety and religion from science and ethics, but he also wants to distinguish it from systems of theology, from doctrines, from dogmas.

So listen here, this is from his work on Christian faith. He says that systems of theology, doctrinal statements basically, they are at best accounts of the

Christian religious affections set forth in speech. They are not necessary for religion itself, because religion itself is that intrinsic, subjective, personal feeling.

They're not necessary. Doctrinal statements aren't necessary for religion itself. They're scarcely even necessary for communicating religion, because how do you communicate a feeling, a sense?

But in some small sense, he says, religious reflection needs and therefore creates doctrine, theological propositions.

So what he seems to be saying is this, that doctrinal affirmations or statements, they're not necessary for religion.

They're not necessary to communicate what we believe about religion. Really, what they are is just a byproduct of piety, this feeling that we have and try to express somehow.

They're kind of just a, they're kind of just a waste product. Theology and doctrinal statements are for Schleiermacher.

A waste product that comes from reflecting on religious experience and that sense of gefühl, that sense of dependence on the infinites that we have as finite creatures.

So it's the Christian religious affection that is at the essence of religion for Schleiermacher, and he does not mean at all the same thing that Jonathan Edwards means by Christian religious affections, which is a devotion, an inward devotion to the

God who reveals himself objectively in his word. That's not what

Schleiermacher means. What he means by Christian affections is the feeling of being totally dependent on the infinite, which means

God, even though the character and attributes of God are left deliberately undefined, you can't really define him.

Affections means the sensation of being dependent on the infinite, the undefinable infinite, both for existence and for redemption, but we're going to see in a minute that both the infinite

God and redemption are radically redefined according to this way of thinking in this model of seeing things and interpreting things.

In his work on the Christian faith, he says, the distinctive essence of Christianity consists in the fact that in it all, or in it, all religious feelings are related to the redemption wrought by Jesus of Nazareth, but he doesn't mean by that what you would mean by that.

For Schleiermacher, Christian theology is not a project of systematizing divinely revealed truth propositions so that we might teach them and maintain the foundation of them as God has given them to us for our faith.

He says, you know what, to do that kind of thing, that's the realm of knowledge. That's the realm of science. It's totally distinct from piety, and religion can't work that way.

All theology is in Christianity is an attempt to set forth a coherent account of the religious experience mystically that Christians have had as they became more and more dependent on the undefined infinite

God. So, what all that means and what all of it boils down to is this, whereas before in the history of the church, certainly during the time of the

Reformation, both the subject matter and the criteria for Christian belief in theology were the objective, divinely, supernaturally revealed truth of God in his word, in contrast for Schleiermacher now, the subjective experience of the believer is both the subject matter and the criteria for Christian belief and Christian experience and Christian theology and whatever we call religion.

And so that meant that all the doctrinal claims of the Christian tradition needed to be re -evaluated, continually re -evaluated in order to determine whether or not they were adequate expressions of this

Christian experience or God consciousness, he liked to call it. The gefühl that Schleiermacher identified as the core of religion.

So in other words, nothing was set in stone anymore. Everything was up for grabs.

Everything was subject to change. And he saw his task now, having created this model whereby religion could all of a sudden be declared relevant again, now his task is to deconstruct old, inadequate doctrinal formulations and then reconstruct new formulations in their place that he thought would do a better job of, in his words, setting forth the

Christian religious affections in speech. Because trying to define the ontological

Trinity doesn't doesn't cut it. Talking about substitutionary atonement certainly doesn't cut it.

Prior to the Enlightenment, divine revelation was final authority. During the

Enlightenment, during the shift, human reason became final authority and the result for religion was that many people saw no place for religion.

And those who did saw its relevance only through the lens of this authority of human reason. George Hegel saw the intellect and the reason, especially speculative reason, as the very core of religion.

Kant said that religion was good and necessary, but only because it provides a basis for morality.

That's his categorical moral imperative. We have to have morality to have a society and without religion, we don't know how we're going to preserve morality.

So let's keep it around, even though it's stupid and irrational. So Schleiermacher see, at the same time and in the same kind of way, trying to rescue

Christianity from obscurity, radically redefines it according to Enlightenment categories.

So that it's not reason, it's not morality, but it's human experience, it's feeling, it's personal self -awareness of your absolute dependence on something greater than you that is at the core of religion.

Experience is primary. That's the big takeaway. Theology was secondary.

Doctrine is subservient to human experience. That's the essence of his method, his hermeneutic theologically, and even though it's been given expression in different forms theologically since the 18th century, really, that's kind of become the assumed hermeneutic for all theological liberalism and the assumed attitude for very, very many

Protestant Christians and churches still today. Experience reigns supreme. Doctrine is second.

Doctrine is subservient. It's probably not true if it doesn't feel so. You probably shouldn't go to that church if the experience isn't right for you.

Doesn't matter what they teach. So where Kant had placed, in his words, religion within the limits of reason alone,

Schleiermacher essentially placed religion within the realm of and the limits of experience alone.

And the ramifications are massive for his theological understanding now, for the formulations, the reformulations that he would cast in the wake of this theological method, and that has persisted into our own age.

You can guess pretty easily probably what all of this meant for Schleiermacher's understanding of the

Bible, first of all, of what we call the objective Word of God.

Here's what he calls it. He says, all doctrines must be extracted from the

Christian religious self -consciousness, i .e., the inward experience of Christian people.

That's what theology is. That's where theology comes from.

Not the Bible, not God. The inward subjective Christian religious experience, and so the

Bible, he said, this is what this book that we have is, it's just a record of the religious experience of the earliest communities of Christians in history.

That's all it is. They're coming up with theology themselves as they express their own experiential dependence upon the infinite, and it's just being written down for us to read so we can have our own experience.

The New Testament, he says, records the perfect God consciousness in the person

Jesus, but Jesus isn't God for him. It's recording, the

New Testament is, it's recording the impact of what he calls the potency of Jesus's perfect God consciousness on all the early

Christians that were around him, and as we read about that, it can have an impact on us too, so we can develop our own

God consciousness and be pious on the basis of our feelings. But see, the authority of Scripture is not absolute at all in his thinking.

It's not inspired, according to him. It's not infallible or even close. There are many, many, there are even entire books,

Schleiermacher says, that are contrary to true Christian piety. He saw the

Bible as special, but certainly not unique. He says, the influence of God that's recorded in the

Bible can and should be expected to be found in lots of other places that could easily be recorded in books just like the

Bible, and probably are in other world religion, religions and their books.

In terms of the doctrine of God, you can just guess how radically different he he formulates things.

Schleiermacher believed that theological definitions of the divine attributes could not be taken to actually describe the actual essence of God.

You can't boil God down to some propositions and attributes. Here's what he wrote on Christian faith.

All attributes which we ascribe to God, that's what it is. It's not what he reveals to us. It's just what we're ascribing to God.

We're having this experience and trying to formulate it in speech, and we're failing, essentially.

All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special or actual in God's essence, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is to be related to him.

In other words, all talk about God is really ultimately just talk about human experience, and what it's resulted in, what it's produced.

In terms of his doctrine of Christ, his Christology, Schleiermacher said that Jesus is really just like the rest of us.

It's just a man. He's just a human. He's not divine. He's not the God -man. He's really just exactly like the rest of us, except from the beginning of his life, from birth,

Jesus, for some reason, had this absolutely potent God -consciousness, he says.

Maybe, you know, Gandhi would be a close second. Jesus is that kind of guy, and that's the product, he speculated, of God's unique activity in the life of a person like Jesus.

And so, understanding Christ, for Schleiermacher, was all about understanding the experience of God -consciousness that was exemplified in Christ.

He didn't see Jesus as the actual incarnation of God in human flesh. He just saw him as the most potent example of the

God -consciousness and the feeling of God -dependency in a human being, because of some unique way that God was working in his life.

Here's his words, From birth, Jesus lived in full and total awareness of his dependence on God.

Listen to this, The Redeemer, Jesus, then, is like all men in virtue of identity of human nature, but he is distinguished from us only by the constant potency of his

God -consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God with him. And then, he calls him the

Redeemer, right? That's good. At least there's a redemption scheme. Listen to this, his soteriology flows right out of that Christology.

Here's what he wrote, The Redeemer, Jesus, assumes believers into the power of his unique and potent

God -consciousness, and this is his redemptive activity. He's so conscious of the infinite, and his need of God, and his need and dependence on the infinite, and that is so potent in him that everybody he's around, and everybody who reads about him, becomes motivated and inspired by that, and more

God -conscious themselves, and that process is redemption. Not atonement for sin, not reconciliation to God, not forgiveness, not justification, not propitiation, not the appeasement of God's wrath, but the production of a growing

God -consciousness in us. The enablement of believers to grow into fullness of God -consciousness themselves, he says, by being impacted by the influence of Jesus's uniquely potent

God -consciousness. And in the same kind of a way, sanctification wasn't about spiritual and moral transformation, because remember, ethics is a separate enterprise altogether, just like science is.

This is religion. Sanctification is not about moral transformation.

It's about personal inspiration and motivation. Tell me that that isn't at the very core of why most churches worship the way they worship today.

It's not about preaching the gospel for the transformation of lives by the renewing of our minds.

It's about inspiring us to have bigger and bigger experiences, to enhance our

God -consciousness, and that's the process of sanctification. So I think it's pretty straightforward to see how this specific and particular theological methodology has had a lasting impact on Protestant Christianity, even till today.

We don't know it, but it has. We may not recognize it, but it's true. It has impacted the way that many, many

Christians and many, many churches think and operate even in our day and age.

Even in churches where orthodox doctrine is maintained, right?

They stand on a reformed confession sometimes, but all too often at the same time that they do that, their expression of Christian piety and ecclesiology and how they worship is influenced by and driven by this kind of romanticism and experientialism that Schleiermacher was promoting, because without it, we're irrelevant, right?

Nobody will come, and so in so many ways experience still reigns supreme,

I think, in much of evangelicalism. In so many ways, individual personal experience is primary, first and foremost, and doctrine, even if and when it might happen to be formulated in a basic, basically orthodox way, doctrine is still secondary.

Doctrine is still subservient to subjective experience, which is why when liberalism, in whichever form it's manifested, whether it's

Schleiermacher's emphasis on experience or the later emphases that came to be true where empirical reason was emphasized, and so the miraculous and supernatural claims of Scripture were dismissed, and the inerrancy of Scripture, and the virgin birth, all of that is thrown out the window because it doesn't make good scientific sense, and so Christianity said, fine, we can do without that.

We'll rip all of that out of our Bibles. We'll call it all myth and legend, as long as you'll still think that we have something relevant to offer, right?

Liberalism, in whatever form it takes, tries to rescue

Christianity from obscurity in the spirit of the age in which we live, and whenever it tries to do that, whenever anyone tries to do that and say, we have to do this in order to remain relevant, we have to say, thanks, but no thanks, because it only ends up in compromise, and in every age there have been, and there will, there will continue to be, if we're to take the words of the

New Testament seriously, Paul's words to Timothy, the words of the book of Revelation, the words of 1st

John, the words of Jude, if we're to take any of that seriously, we have to understand that there will continue to be cultured despisers who doubt and deny the objective truth and veracity and authority of Scripture, and the truths that are clearly and perspicuously revealed in Scripture, and what the church does not need to do and must not do is to concede the high ground.

We can't. We can't allow to stand the proposition that subjective human reason or experience reigns supreme, and that the

Scriptures are not the objective, God -breathed, living, active, inerrant Word of God, whether or not you feel like it, and whether or not it makes sense to you, they are.

That's what we have to insist on, and what the church must do, has to do, is to stand firm, continue to proclaim the ultimate final authority of the objective

Word of God, and call people to repent, not just of their outward sins, not just of their adultery, and their fornication, and their addictions to pornography, and alcohol, and drugs, and treating their wives badly.

Yes, they need to repent of that, but they need to repent at the core of their rebellion against the objective authority and the sufficiency of God and His Word, and so the church has got to continue to do what many churches did in the age of the

Enlightenment. Praise be to God, and by the grace of God they did, and we must preach the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, because that is the power of God towards salvation, not just moral transformation, not just experiential piety and pietism, but the renewing of our minds, the radical reorientation of our whole perception of reality, and the repentance of our denial of God and suppression of His truth.

We've got to be confident in the promise of Jesus Christ that no matter what the prevailing consensus of our age is, and no matter how much the culture despises the objective truths of the

Christian faith, and no matter how many churches around us wander astray after those trends and compromise themselves, and no matter how big those churches become, and little ours become, no matter how out of date and obscure and irrelevant we are told that we are, we have to be confident that in fact the

Sovereign God is continuing to build His church. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Amen? All right, I'm done. Let me close this with a word of prayer. Father, we do say amen, and we do put our confidence in You, and again give

You praise that You have revealed Yourself to us and that that revelation is objective, and that it is true, it is sufficient, it is our authority, and we ask for the courage and the confidence to be able to stand firm in Jesus' name.