Friedrich Schleiermacher

21 November 1768 - Schleiermacher was born in Breslau, Prussia (now Poland)

1778 - Age 9 or 10 the family moved to a Herrnhuter (Moravian) community. They wanted a living relationship with God that went beyond mere doctrines. Friedrich said he experienced a birth into a high life.

• He became disenchanted with the doctrinal rigidity but he came to believe that true religion had to be experienced.

At 15 he went to a Moravian school at Niesky.

• His mother died and his father, as a military chaplain was always away with the army.

• He learnt Latin and Greek.

At 17, he graduated and went to the Moravian seminary at Barby.

A secret reading group he started began studying Enlightenment literature and questioning some of the doctrines: divine punishment for sin, Christ's sacrificial substitution for us on the cross, the eternal deity of Christ. But he anted the piety of the Herrnhuters.

• When discovered, some members were expelled.

• He wrote to his father saying that he was attracted to some of these Enlightenment ideas. His father was distressed but agreed to his leaving Barby and going to the University of Halle. This alienated him from his father.

• He engaged in private study of the philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and, especially, Emmanuel Kant.

He became a private tutor for the family of a count in the countryside of Prussia. He rediscovered being part of a family.

• He continued studying, especially the philosophy of Spinoza.

• The count wanted a more traditional education for his children so Schleiermacher left.

At 27, he moved to Berlin. He loved the intellectual discussions in the salons. The topic of the day was Romanticism i.e. Enlightenment rationalism is too barren. True religion is not about doctrine but a living experience of God.

• He mixed with Romantic writers and artists (including Friedrich Schlegel) and with a circle of friends including Eleonore Grunow to whom he was immediately attracted. However, she was unhappily married to a Lutheran pastor. There was affection between them but never more than that.

  • In 1804 it was obvious she would never leave her husband and Schleiermacher was forsaken.

• He passed his second ordination exams and became an assistant pastor at Lansburg(?) for two years.

He became chaplain at the Charity Hospital. He, a Reformed pastor, shared the role with a Lutheran pastor.

He wanted to make Christianity relevant and believable to the modern age. He wanted to protect it from the rational attacks of the Enlightenment.

• Instead of having his apologetics built on his theology, all of his theology was derived from his apologetics.

  • The experience of Christianity would be so incontrovertible that it would render intellectual attacks (e.g. on historical details) irrelevant. Modern people do not have to stop being modern to be a Christian.

At the University of Berlin, one of Schleiermacher's colleagues was Hegel.

1799 - Wrote On Religion: Speeches To Its Cultured Despisers.

• His Enlightenment friends had little time for religion.

• He is trying to gain respect for Christianity by accommodating it to the ideas of the day.

1802 - he moved to a parish in Stolt(?) in the country.

1804 - called to the University of Halle as a Reformed professor in a faculty entirely Lutheran and as a chaplain.

• He lectured on theology, ethics, hermeneutics, biblical studies.

1806 - Prussian army routed in the battle of Jena-Auerstedt, by Napoleon. The University of Halle was dissolved.

Returned to Berlin

1809 - became the minister of the Trinity Church in Berlin.

1809 - he married Henriette von Karten(?)

• They had one son, Nathanael, who died at 9.

Wrote The Christian Faith

12 February 1834 - Schleiermacher died