Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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of his own awareness of God” (Gerrish, 1984:48).
Schleiermacher believed that God created the world ‘good,’ but that through
mankind’s sin, humanity and creation were corrupted. Mankind is prone to sin because
they are born into this predisposition. “Through sin men are alienated from God and
therefore fear Him as judge, knowing that they deserve His wrath” (Latourette,
1975:1123). He further maintained that redemption was through Christ, who was a man,
“but a man who was entirely unique in that he was dominated by the consciousness of
God as no man had been before him and no man has since been” (ibid. 1123). His views
were essentially those of historic Christianity, but his starting place was different than
most, for he “began, not with the Bible, a creed, or revelation, but with personal
experience with what happens to the individual and to the community” (ibid. 1124). This
personal subjectivity and relativism would later be fully embraced and developed by the
postmodernists, though they had little regard for the God of Bible.
Scleiermacher’s attempts to ‘reconfigure’ Christian theology inevitably led to the
highly destructive Liberalism that blossomed in the early 20th Century. Schleiermacher
really believed he was responding in the only way then possible to the gauntlet Kant had
laid. “Kant’s restriction of reason to the world of sense experience presented a serious
problem for any religious thought -- whether traditional orthodoxy or its deistic
alternative -- that linked belief with reason” (Grenz, 1992:43). Schleiermacher’s response
to Kant facilitated fresh thinking about the challenges of modernity, but certainly did not
respond in a way that preserved the orthodox foundations of the faith.
Pre-eminent theologian, Karl Barth, respected Schleiermacher’s contribution, but was
also one of his greatest critics. Barth believed Schleiermacher’s work was radically
anthropocentric, “setting the course at the end of which certain theologians of the midtwentieth
century proclaimed God to be dead” (Grenz, 1992:50). What Schleiermacher
had begun, would eventually culminate in the work of Albrecht Ritschl, often called the
father of classical liberal theology. As controversial as Schleiermacher was, and is, he
did help to resurrect the Christian faith at a time when rationalist thinking had nearly
rendered it impotent, and also did much to unite practical aspects of the faith with the
theoretical.
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa