Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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expression. This “first response (propagated or practiced by Schleiermacher, Pietism, and
the evangelical awakenings) was to divorce religion from reason, locate it in human
feeling and experience, and thus protect it from any possible attacks by the
enlightenment’s tendency toward ‘objectifying consciousness’” (Bosch, 2000:269).
Schleiermacher was raised in a strong Christian family. He attended the Moravian
seminary at Barby, and later studied at Halle -- at the time, the centre of radical thought in
Germany -- then at Berlin, and read Kant and other modernists. He eventually became a
member of “a brilliant circle of romantic writers and poets” (Brown, 1968:109). It was
during this time that he published his celebrated, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured
Despisers (1799). Following the Napoleonic wars, he became one of the leading
intellectuals in Germany and helped found the University of Berlin in 1810, the school at
which he dominated the faculty of theology. He wrote much, and published works like
the Life of Jesus. Many consider his systematic theology, The Christian Faith (1821,
1830), his most important work. Others consider him the most important theologian
between John Calvin and Karl Barth (cf., Livingston, 1997:93) -- a man who has
influenced a great many, including Kierkegaard.
Schleiermacher explored and expanded traditionalist thinking. He sought to liberate
theology from archaic forms, and worked to better understand the faith within the
modernist climate. The rationalist challenges to theology at the time, and still even in our
day, subjected all thought and history to critical scrutiny, a standard many from the faith
community tried to attain. Yet, Schleiermacher questioned the overall value of this overrationalistic
approach to faith, emphasizing the practical over the theoretical, without
necessarily sacrificing reason for faith (cf., fideism). Where theology before modernity
had been ‘from above,’ or of transcendent focus, after the arrival of modernity, and in
Schleiermacher’s work as well, theology came ‘from below,’ having a God-imminent
emphasis.
From Thomas Aquinas onwards were those who tried to merge the revealed, biblical
faith, with natural theology -- the construct that focuses on God revealing himself through
nature, in contrast to God-revealed through the prophets and their inspired writings. Kant
held “that the two cancelled each other out, because natural theology was rotten at the
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa