An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant — Kant — John Shaqi
An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
Between Kant and Hegel came another, Schleiermacher. He too was no mean
philosopher. But he was essentially a theologian, the founder of modern
theology. He served in the same faculty with Hegel and was overshadowed
by him. His influence upon religious thought was less immediate. It has
been more permanent. It was characteristically upon the side which Kant
and Hegel had neglected. That was the side of feeling. His theology has
been called the theology of feeling. He defined religion as feeling.
Christianity is for him a specific feeling. Because he made so much of
feeling, his name has been made a theological household word by many who
appropriated little else of all he had to teach. His warmth and passion,
his enthusiasm for Christ, the central place of Christ in his system,
made him loved by many who, had they understood him better, might have
loved him less. For his real greatness lay, not in the fact that he
possessed these qualities alone, but that he possessed them in a
singularly beautiful combination with other qualities. The emphasis is,
however, correct. He was the prophet of feeling, as Kant had been of
ethical religion and Hegel of the intellectuality of faith. The entire
Protestant theology of the nineteenth century has felt his influence.
The English-speaking race is almost as much his debtor as is his own.
The French Huguenots of the revival felt him to be one of themselves.
Even to Amiel and Scherer he was a kindred spirit.
It is a true remark of Dilthey that in unusual degree an understanding
of the man's personality and career is necessary to the appreciation of
his thought. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher was born in 1768 in
Breslau, the son of a chaplain in the Reformed Church. He never
connected himself officially with the Lutheran Church. We have alluded
to an episode broadly characteristic of his youth. He was tutor in the
house of one of the landed nobility of Prussia, curate in a country
parish, preacher at the Charité in Berlin in 1795, professor
extraordinarius at Halle in 1804, preacher at the Church of the
Dreifaltigkeit in Berlin in 1807, professor of theology and organiser of
that faculty in the newly-founded University of Berlin in 1810. He never
gave up his position as pastor and preacher, maintaining this activity
along with his unusual labours as teacher, executive and author. He died
in 1834. In his earlier years in Berlin he belonged to the circle of
brilliant men and women who made Berlin famous in those years. It was a
fashionable society composed of persons more or less of the
rationalistic school. Not a few of them, like the Schlegels, were deeply
tinged with romanticism. There were also among them Jews of the house of
the elder Mendelssohn. Morally it was a society not altogether above
reproach. Its opposition to religion was a by-word. An affection of the
susceptible youth for a woman unhappily married brought him to the verge
of despair.