The bridge from Kant into modern theology was made easily. Kant initially argued that reason cannot establish the reality and nature of God, and then, in his Critique of Practical Reason, he went on to propose that it is only in moral experience that such knowledge can be grounded, for the knowledge we have of ourselves as moral beings is inexplicable if God does not exist.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology and the chief formulator of liberal Protestantism, agreed with Kant that the reality and nature of God are neither given by reason nor accessible to it, but he went on to propose that this knowledge is grounded in religious rather than moral experience. The general acceptance of this proposal has had profound implications for the doing of theology and has done much to give the popular culture of the modernized West the shape it now has. Our culture tends either to view experience as suffused with the divine or to confer divinity on the self.
The Immanence of God as Feeling
First in his Speeches on Religion and then in his much more complex work The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher repudiated objective knowledge of God and then, like the romantics, reached down into his own being to find the grounding for his knowledge of God. This being the case, a rehearsal of the divine attributes will tell us less about God than about ourselves, for each of them is now simply an objectification of what we first find in our religious self. We experience sin in ourselves, and we project an understanding of God
as holy; we find that we are able to resolve internal conflicts, and we attribute the resolution to God in terms of grace and love.
Schleiermacher dismissed entirely the vertical dimension of a God outside of experience summoning sinners through biblical revelation to pass beyond themselves into union with God through Christ. He maintained that the knowledge of God was restricted to the self, where the immanence of God was registered in feeling - specifically, awe deriving from radical dependence. Thus God became a kind of psychological deposit, a "something" deep in the self. Somewhere within, the divine signature could be read with enough clarity to secure some meaning in life. Thus it was that in the liberalism that followed Schleiermacher, in Europe as well as in America, poetry gradually edged out exposition, feeling replaced reason as the primary means of knowing God, the heart replaced the head, and intuition supplanted external, revelatory truth.
A Lack of Objectivity
Barth said, "Theology suffers from a chronic lack of objectivity" in our age; "we do not know what we are talking about when we talk about God but we still want to talk about him," so theologians have repeatedly returned to Schleiermacher to see if perhaps he might show us how to do it.
As David Ray Griffin has noted, post-modern theologians "registered their conviction that that noble and flawed enterprise called modern theology had run its course." They have abandoned their belief in the old Enlightenment project and its optimism, its expectation that reason would be able to pacify and comprehend the world. They have walked away from the old preoccupations with truth and meaning and the intellectual categories in which theology had been conceived, such as natural and supernatural, truth and error, transcendent and immanent.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology and the chief formulator of liberal Protestantism, agreed with Kant that the reality and nature of God are neither given by reason nor accessible to it, but he went on to propose that this knowledge is grounded in religious rather than moral experience. The general acceptance of this proposal has had profound implications for the doing of theology and has done much to give the popular culture of the modernized West the shape it now has. Our culture tends either to view experience as suffused with the divine or to confer divinity on the self.
The Immanence of God as Feeling
First in his Speeches on Religion and then in his much more complex work The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher repudiated objective knowledge of God and then, like the romantics, reached down into his own being to find the grounding for his knowledge of God. This being the case, a rehearsal of the divine attributes will tell us less about God than about ourselves, for each of them is now simply an objectification of what we first find in our religious self. We experience sin in ourselves, and we project an understanding of God
as holy; we find that we are able to resolve internal conflicts, and we attribute the resolution to God in terms of grace and love.
Schleiermacher dismissed entirely the vertical dimension of a God outside of experience summoning sinners through biblical revelation to pass beyond themselves into union with God through Christ. He maintained that the knowledge of God was restricted to the self, where the immanence of God was registered in feeling - specifically, awe deriving from radical dependence. Thus God became a kind of psychological deposit, a "something" deep in the self. Somewhere within, the divine signature could be read with enough clarity to secure some meaning in life. Thus it was that in the liberalism that followed Schleiermacher, in Europe as well as in America, poetry gradually edged out exposition, feeling replaced reason as the primary means of knowing God, the heart replaced the head, and intuition supplanted external, revelatory truth.
A Lack of Objectivity
Barth said, "Theology suffers from a chronic lack of objectivity" in our age; "we do not know what we are talking about when we talk about God but we still want to talk about him," so theologians have repeatedly returned to Schleiermacher to see if perhaps he might show us how to do it.
As David Ray Griffin has noted, post-modern theologians "registered their conviction that that noble and flawed enterprise called modern theology had run its course." They have abandoned their belief in the old Enlightenment project and its optimism, its expectation that reason would be able to pacify and comprehend the world. They have walked away from the old preoccupations with truth and meaning and the intellectual categories in which theology had been conceived, such as natural and supernatural, truth and error, transcendent and immanent.
- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland:
The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.
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