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Handout #222 |
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Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) |
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Schleiermacher, a product of Moravian piety,
wanted to safeguard religion and inward Christianity even from the
philosophical thought of his time. This new reading of religion has led him
to be regarded as the father of Liberal Protestantism.
To make clear to you what is the original and characteristic possession of religion, it resigns at once all claims on anything that belongs either to science or morality. Whether it has been borrowed or bestowed it is not returned. Religion does not seek to determine and explain the universe in accordance with its nature, as metaphysics does; it does not seek to perfect it and complete it by the development of the freedom and the divine fee judgment of man, as morality does. In essence it is neither thought nor action but intuitive contemplation and sentiment. It seeks contemplate the universe intuitively; it seeks to observe it piously in its manifestations and its distinctive actions; it seeks, as passively as a child, to be grasped by it and to be swept away by its direct influences. This in essence and effect it is totally opposed to metaphysics and morality ... It seeks to see in man, no less than in any other particular and finite being, the infinite, the copy and representation of the Infinite. J. D. E. Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion to its Cultural Despisers(1799), Second Speech. |
