It could be argued that a defining weakness of Anglican theology in the post-Enlightenment period is that it has lacked a paradigm-setting figure such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and, indeed, until rather late in the twentieth century few Anglican theologians engaged deeply or extensively with this “father of modern theology.” Anglicanism has, of course, produced many notable scholars in particular areas of theology such as New Testament Studies, Church History, and Liturgics but what it has lacked has been a model for synthesizing the spectrum of theological studies as a whole. Many might say “A good thing too,” looking askance at what might be perceived as a Germanic tendency to pursue systematic studies at the expense of life—but, as many of the essays in this volume illustrate, that is just what Schleiermacher emphatically did not do, since, despite the extraordinary scope of his theological activity, this was all developed from and was continuously related back to a starting-point in the actual lived religious life of individuals and communities. It is indicative of this neglect that the first English translations of his best-known works, On Religion and The Christian Faith, were produced by Scottish theologians who shared Schleiermacher’s Reformed faith.
Before going any further, it is worthwhile underlining just the extraordinary range of Schleiermacher’s intellectual engagements. As I have mentioned, he is known to theologians as “the father of modern theology” but “theology” in the narrow sense is the focus of only about a third of the entries in this Handbook. Lutz Käppel’s article, for example, reminds us that “Schleiermacher can be regarded as the intellectual and organizational founding father of modern German classical scholarship, as it was practiced from the nineteenth century onwards,” adding that his translation of the Platonic corpus has remained the “landmark” for modern German translations down to the present (p. 501). But that is only a beginning. He also played formative roles in pedagogy (Michael Winkler), hermeneutics (Christian Berner), and, as Johannes Zachhuber shows, played a pivotal role in determining the organization of the new University of Berlin that became a model for many of the later new universities in Germany and around the world, including the USA. At the same time, he was not merely associated with the Early Romantic movement in Germany but was a key member of its inner circle, cohabiting with Friedrich Schlegel and collaborating on the production of the Athenaeum, the movement’s journal. Schleiermacher would have a lifelong interest in the arts, lecturing on aesthetics (Holden Kelm) and interacting with many contemporary artists, including Mendelssohn and Kasper David Friedrich (the latter is not mentioned in the Handbook, but Schleiermacher visited Friedrich during the latter’s work on the masterpiece “The Monk by the Sea” and seems to have had some influence on Friedrich’s understanding of his own artistic practice).
This “Romantic” element is most obviously visible in the Speeches On Religion (1799) and is also connected with many of the standard charges against him, such as his role in reducing Christian faith to a matter of individual subjective feeling and a failure to engage in the objective questions of dogmatic theology. As the Handbook also shows, such charges entirely overlook the range of his teaching and writing in theology itself, ranging from Christology (Maureen Junker-Kelly), through New Testament Studies (where, as Christian Danz explains, he was an early exponent of the historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus), to Christian ethics (James M. Brandt). There is also a case to be made for seeing him as establishing practical theology as a bona fide theological discipline in its own right (Birgit Weyel). At the same time, he had a continuous preaching ministry, that attracted many from beyond conventional church circles, including (as Catherine L. Kelsey comments) “Moravians, Jews, baptized and unbaptized Christians, young philosophers and philologists, and ‘elegant women’” (p. 461)—hinting at the extraordinary personal charisma that he radiated into his last years.
As with so many nineteenth century figures, we also have to be aware that the context for Schleiermacher’s early career was one of war and revolution. He was directly impacted by the Napoleonic invasion of Prussia and, during the wars, was chaplain at Berlin’s Charité hospital—presumably confronting him with the grim realities of human suffering. He was passionately engaged in the Prussian national movement and, in addition to the many other subject areas already listed, also lectured on political theory (see the article by Miriam Rose). In this regard, it is important to emphasize that, as several of the articles in this collection argue, Schleiermacher was so far from being a theological individualist that his writings are premised on the essential interaction of individual Christian life with the larger community, inclusive of both Church and nation. Whatever else is to be said for or against him, he was no ivory tower intellectual, but a man thoroughly engaged by and active in the life of his time.
There is, then, a great deal for this Handbook to address and it largely does so very successfully. A high percentage of the contributions are from German scholars, reflecting the extensive and robust state of Schleiermacher studies in Germany today. Occasionally, contributors perhaps assume too much by way of existing knowledge on the part of readers who, for the Handbook series, should be assumed to have no specialist knowledge either of the primary materials or the secondary literature. On the whole, however, the articles are accessible and, as I have indicated, collectively succeed in getting across the exceptional range of Schleiermacher’s intellectual activity. The Handbook is divided into three main parts. The first ‘Schleiermacher in Context’ examines both the major influences on his development (Plato, Kant, Spinoza, and the Reformed Tradition) and his relation to his contemporaries, primarily the early Romantics such as Schlegel and Novalis with whom he shared religious, social, and artistic aspirations. The second part focuses on “Schleiermacher’s Thought,” where we only come to theology after articles on “Dialectic,” “Philosophical Ethics,” “Theory of Education,” “Hermeneutics,” “Aesthetics,” “Psychology and Anthropology,” and the “Theory of the State.” The next two sections of this part come to the more recognizably theological Schleiermacher, dealing respectively with what we might call his systematic works and what the editors call his “Pastoral and Occasional Writings,” the latter including the remarkable “Christmas Eve” dialogue in which Schleiermacher explores the mystery of Christmas by imagining a Christmas Eve house-party at which the guests, including at least one skeptic, discuss just what Christmas is all about (Andrew Packman and Andrew C. Dole). The final part looks at “Thinking after Schleiermacher,” examining both the reception history of his work and its potential for “Constructive Uses” today, where race, gender, Religious Studies, and the philosophy of culture are major headings.
With regard to the reception history, students of theology are likely to make a beeline for the article on the critical response by Neo-Orthodoxy and Dialectical Theology, where the name of Barth looms large. Many will, alas, know Schleiermacher primarily in the mirror of Barth’s depiction of him as the pre-eminent representative of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism and the evacuation of dogmatic content from theology. However, as Paul Dafydd Jones’s article argues, this is not only a caricature of Schleiermacher but also of Barth’s more nuanced relation to his predecessor. The view of Schleiermacher as “liberal” is itself complexified in Arnulf von Schelina’s article, which alerts us to the fact that ‘liberal’ is more of a twentieth-century than a nineteenth-century label, and not one that Schleiermacher ever applied to himself (pp. 522–3). With regard to constructive uses of Schleiermacher’s in relation to race and gender, this is always going to be problematic for just about any major figure of his time. Nevertheless, Theodore Vial argues that “Schleiermacher is still a good person to think with” about race (Vial, p. 609), while Ravenscroft considers that his thought contains resources for critically reflecting on gender that go beyond what some have regarded as his own “constricted cultural imagination” (p. 614)—an issue that is also to the fore in the discussion of the Christmas Eve dialogue.
A review such as this cannot do justice to the range of scholarship represented in this collection. There are obstacles to seeing Schleiermacher as our contemporary, not least due to the dense style of his theological writings and his engagement with horizons that, in many cases, are no longer our own. Yet, albeit unevenly, the Handbook makes clear that there are many areas where his thought remains fruitful for our time. Theologians can always learn from a thinker for whom redemption in Christ was the fulcrum of his faith and theological reflection, while the second speech on religion remains a paradigm of apologetic writing and a powerful religious statement in its own right—despite or perhaps because of its romanticism. Schleiermacher lives on in unexpected ways. Back in the 1990s, for example, the English philosopher Andrew Bowie (whose work is not discussed here) used Schleiermacher in a critical pushback against Derridean deconstruction, arguing that Schleiermacher provided us with sufficient attention to the kinds of challenges involved in establishing the meaning of a given text that deconstruction brought to the fore but without succumbing to what was widely seen at the time as Derrida’s relativism. In a very different context, I know a young Chinese woman who was converted to Christianity through reading a Chinese translation of Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus that she had bought from a street bookstall in Beijing. If not our contemporary, Schleiermacher will be with us for a long time to come, one of the few post-Enlightenment thinkers to have a credible claim to be viewed as a modern Church Father and this Handbook—which, N. B., is not to be confused with an “Introduction”—provides a valuable resource for those who have begun to engage with his work and now need further guidance.
