欢迎来到留学生英语论文网

客服信息

我们支持 澳洲论文代写 Assignment代写、加拿大论文代写 Assignment代写、新西兰论文代写 Assignment代写、美国论文代写 Assignment代写、英国论文代写 Assignment代写、及其他国家的英语文书润色修改代写方案.论文写作指导服务

唯一联系方式Q微:7878393

当前位置:首页 > 论文范文 > Religion

Friedrich Schleiermacher Blazed The Trail Of Liberal Theologism Religion Essay

发布时间:2017-04-06
该论文是我们的学员投稿,并非我们专家级的写作水平!如果你有论文作业写作指导需求请联系我们的客服人员

Introduction

Out of the period known as the Renaissance, from the 14th to 17th Century, came the Enlightenment of the 18th century that began to change theological thought. On a par with the likes of Calvin and Aquinas in the history of Christian thought, the German philosopher/theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher blazed the trail of liberal theology. The age of Enlightenment through reason was emphasised by the theologian Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) as a coming of age and a point of maturity. People would no longer put up with the church handing down doctrine and instruction of holiness but would now become autonomous agents in where they could decide for themselves what was in fact good and true. Friedrich Schleiermacher entered the debate on theology and science, taking the idea of personal autonomy with regard to religious experience further and commencing to base his theology on human inner experience and feeling. He said that "True religion is sense and taste for the Infinite".[1]

This period, up until the latter part of the nineteenth century, had become known as an age of reason. The accepted approaches to theology were now changing and it is this changing period and the differences in theological thinking that were arising, particularly the proposals put forward by Schleiermacher that will be discussed in this paper.

On Religion Speeches to its Cultured Despisers

Schleiermacher wrote his first successful book, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, (1799) because he wanted to persuade his circle of friends, who were all influenced by Romanticism, that true religion was more a matter of human feeling than dogma.[2]In the first of these five speeches, Schleiermacher accused his circle of friends ('the cultured despisers') of having no awareness of the Infinite. He said: "Suavity and sociability, art and science has so fully taken possession of your minds, that no room remains for the eternal and holy Being that lies beyond the world."[3]

Religion was becoming overshadowed by the increasingly scientific advances that were sweeping across Europe in this period. Schleiermacher saw the need to defend religion not by trying to prove the existence of God scientifically but by looking inward into humankind's inner being. He believed that God could be encountered by every living person and that everyone is equipped with the ability to encounter God within themselves. His 'cultured despisers' had led him to the point where he attempted to try to convince them about the reality of God by writing this defence of religion.[4]

Development of Schleiermacher's Ideas

Emmanuel Kant proposed that man was to find God within himself but Schleiermacher extended this way of thinking, pointing out that man should find the essence of all religion within himself. Schleiermacher realised that rational thought driven by reason had run its course and that faith in God should become increasingly something that came from within the heart of the person rather than from the Church's dogma. Schleiermacher believed that the Romantic concern with inner feelings and imagination was what drove a person's faith in God. Grenz and Olsen stated that "Schleiermacher sought to provide an alternative approach through intuition. He looked to a fundamental universal human feeling, the feeling of dependence on the whole of reality."[5]This does imply that it is people who initiate the contact with God, yet Karl Barth believed that the revelation of God can only be initiated by Him. He argued that "… revelation in the Christian sense is the self revelation of the Creator of all that is, the self-revelation of the Lord of all Being. It is not immanent, this worldly revelation, but comes from outside of man and the cosmos. It is a transcendent revelation."[6]

Schleiermacher was an idealist who held that human knowledge being just a sample or taste of reality, with man arriving at this point of knowledge by a conflict.[7]It was Hegel (1770-1831) who maintained that reality is rational. He believed that no individual fact can be fully understood except in its relation to the whole.[8]Consequently, German idealism became burdened with the belief that reality was almost unreachable or else totally unreachable in itself. Schleiermacher struggled in his conviction put his religious beliefs in a more concrete way. Arising from his Romantic beliefs, Schleiermacher was struck by "a profound and mystical view of the inner depths of the human personality."[9]The ego, he postulated, is part of "an individualisation of universal reason; and the primary act of self-consciousness is the first conjunction of universal and individual life, the immediate union or marriage of the universe with incarnated reason."[10]Supreme unity of thought therefore cannot be attained by knowledge and science but can instead be found by intuition in our self-consciousness or as Schleiermacher stated, from "feeling." Unity with God could be attained from this inner wellspring where thought and action are born.[11]"A child of the Enlightenment and victim of the romantic illusion, Schleiermacher felt it that it was the personality and inner self consciousness of the individual that mattered."[12]This kind of thinking was inline with his Protestant persuasion that individual conscience was all that was needed to distinguish what was both correct in belief and good in morality. He believed that humankind possesses a feeling of absolute dependence, with each person feeling totally dependent on some power outside of themselves. He felt that this feeling could only be explained by God's very existence and that this is "the only adequate explanation for the origin of such feelings. We do not know God! We only know the feeling! We infer God from the feeling!"[13]

From here it follows, in man's search for God or in God's search for man, that religion is based on humankind's inner feelings being manifest in verbalisation. Schleiermacher himself said, "Christian doctrines are accounts of the religious affections set forth in speech." "The Bible, then, is only a collection of man's religious feelings. Some of these writers might have known Jesus personally. To Schleiermacher, Jesus epitomised dependence."[14]Schleiermacher called this dependence on God "a feeling or intuition of the universe" a conscious unity of reason and nature; a mingling of the finite within the infinite where the temporal meets the eternal. As this idea developed he began describing it as the feeling of absolute dependence.[15]

Religion is basically a social phenomenon and always gives birth to communities that bind people together in their belief in higher forms of life. In Speeches, Schleiermacher wrote that "Religion is for you at one time a way of thinking, a faith, a peculiar way of contemplating the world, and of combining what meets us in the world: at another, it is a way of acting, a peculiar desire and love, a special kind of conduct and character."[16]He proposed that these definitions of religion should be divided into two contrasting sciences: the former, physics or metaphysics, and the latter, ethics or the doctrine of duties or practical philosophy.[17]The first describes the nature of things or how man conceives things of the world; the second teaches how people should be and what they should do in the world. From this hypothesis, that religion is a way of thinking of something and knowledge is knowing about something, Schleiermacher asked the question: "Has it not the same object as the above sciences"?[18]Faith, he said, comes from the relation of man to God and to the world and religion is a mixture of theoretical and practical knowledge. Schleiermacher proposed to his friends that "belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world." He told his friends that this faith or belief was the object of their hostility and, because of this, there was a gulf between the cultured and learned with that of the pious.[19]Until they accepted that faith, the God given intuition or feeling, was something that all human beings had within themselves, they would continue to scoff at the idea. Faith was, to Schleiermacher, a reality within humanity that science stubbornly refused to accept as an integral part of the human make-up.

Conclusion

Schleiermacher was always challenged by the fast pace of modern science, which was pushing religion out of accepted sciences. The circles of friends that Schleiermacher mixed with were opposed to religion but he attempted to persuade them to give faith and belief a chance and, through his speeches about religion, to accept that we all have a 'God space' within us. It was not an easy task to convince his friends of the existence of this absolute dependence, through humanity's built in intuition of God awareness within them. Yet because of his passion to persuade his cultural despisers to accept that faith should be regarded as just as important as other sciences, Schleiermacher became a trail blazer of liberal theology. His legacy is still with us and his philosophical theology reaches down through the ages to the present day in universities around the world. He proposed that all human beings have the ability to encounter God through their intuition and feeling and, from this, to become fully aware of the absolute dependence they have on God. Schleiermacher summed up his second speech with these words: "The only way of acquiring what lies outside the direction of the mind we have selected, is to enjoy and comprehend it thus as a whole, not by will as art, but by instinct for the universe as religion."[20]

上一篇:Gods Role In The 17th Century Religion Essay 下一篇:返回列表