The Rise of Liberal Theology Schleiermacher

Historical Theology

Historical Setting

By the close of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had done its corrosive work among the educated classes of Europe. Among the cultured elite of Berlin — the Romantic poets, the philosophers, the salon intellectuals — Christianity was widely regarded as a relic, fit perhaps for the unlettered but beneath the dignity of a thinking person. They were not crude atheists; they were, in Schleiermacher’s own phrase, the “cultured despisers” of religion, who had quietly set faith aside as outgrown.

Into this milieu stepped a young Reformed preacher, the son of a chaplain, shaped by the warm heart-religion of the Moravian pietists yet fully conversant with the philosophy of his day. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) determined to win religion a hearing again among those who had dismissed it. In 1799 he published, anonymously, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers — one of the most consequential books in the history of theology.

What Was at Stake

The Enlightenment had attacked religion from two sides. The rationalists said religion must reduce to reason and morality (Kant); the orthodox insisted it rested on revealed doctrines now under critical fire. Schleiermacher’s question was radical: what if both had misunderstood the nature of religion? What if religion were neither a system of doctrines nor a code of ethics, but something more primal — a distinct province of human experience?

The stakes could not be higher. If Schleiermacher were right, religion could be rescued from the critics by being relocated beyond their reach. But the relocation would come at a price: the seat of authority would shift from the Word of God outside us to the religious experience within us.

Key Players

Friedrich Schleiermacher is rightly called the father of modern, or liberal, theology. His mature dogmatics, The Christian Faith (1821–22), defined religion as the feeling of absolute dependence (schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl) — the immediate consciousness of being utterly dependent on that which is infinite. Doctrines, for Schleiermacher, are not statements about God in Himself; they are “accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.” Theology describes the believing community’s experience. Christ is supreme not because He is the eternal Word made flesh in the classical sense, but because His God-consciousness was perfect and complete, and He communicates it to the church.

We must state his project sympathetically. Schleiermacher was a churchman who preached the gospel weekly, who loved Christ as the Redeemer, who sought to keep Christianity alive in a hostile age. He did not set out to gut the faith but to save it.

Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) carried the trajectory forward, recentering theology on the kingdom of God as a this-worldly moral community and on value-judgments about Christ’s worth rather than metaphysical claims about His person.

Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), the great church historian, distilled liberalism’s “essence of Christianity” to the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of the human soul — stripping away the “husk” of dogma to reach the “kernel” of Jesus’ simple teaching.

This trajectory flowed naturally into the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, which translated the kingdom into programs of social reform.

The Outcome

Liberal theology came to dominate the elite Protestant academy of Europe and, increasingly, of America, well into the twentieth century. It produced genuine scholarship and a real concern for the poor. But by relocating authority to experience, it had no fixed standard by which to resist the spirit of any age — a vulnerability exposed catastrophically when Harnack and most of his liberal colleagues signed the manifesto endorsing the Kaiser’s war aims in 1914, prompting the young Karl Barth’s revolt.

Scriptural Grounding

The Reformed objection is not that experience is unreal but that it cannot be the foundation. Authority rests in God’s external Word.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)

The gospel is rooted in objective, accomplished events, not in inner feeling:

“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures… he was buried… he was raised on the third day.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4)

And the human heart is too corrupt to serve as the measure of revelation:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

Doctrinal Significance

Schleiermacher’s turn marks the great fork in modern theology. The historic faith says: God has spoken; theology listens and confesses. Liberalism says: humanity has religious experience; theology describes it. The first grounds authority in revelation; the second grounds it in the religious subject.

The cost of the relocation is severe. Once experience is foundational, every objective doctrine becomes negotiable. Sin becomes imperfect God-consciousness rather than rebellion against a holy God. Christ becomes the supreme God-conscious man rather than the incarnate Son who bears divine wrath. The atonement loses its substitutionary heart; the resurrection becomes dispensable; revelation as God’s speech evaporates.

A Reformed Assessment — Wheat and Chaff

We assess with charity. The wheat in Schleiermacher is real: he rightly insisted that true religion is more than dry doctrine or bare morality, that it engages the whole person, the affections and the heart — an emphasis Calvin and Edwards would not wholly disown. He took seriously the church as a believing community. And his apologetic instinct — to commend Christ to a despising culture — is one every evangelist must share.

The chaff, however, is fatal to the gospel. By making the feeling of absolute dependence the foundation, Schleiermacher inverted the proper order of theology, placing the creature’s experience where the Creator’s Word must stand. The result is a Christianity reconstructed in man’s image. Where the Reformed principium confesses an objective Word authenticated by the Spirit (WCF 1.5), liberalism offers only the religious self speaking about itself. The despisers were, perhaps, won — but to what? Not to the Christ who is “the radiance of the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3), but to a projection of pious feeling.

Connections

This guide engages Prolegomena and Bibliology (the source and seat of theological authority), Theology Proper, and Christology. It stands in sharpest contrast to WCF 1, especially 1.4–1.6 and 1.10, which root authority in God speaking in Scripture rather than in human experience.

Backward, liberalism is the offspring of the Enlightenment’s autonomy (06_01) and a departure from the Reformation’s sola Scriptura. It is the polar opposite of Old Princeton’s confessional defense (06_04), with which it was locked in conflict. Forward, Schleiermacher’s heirs — Ritschl, Harnack, the social gospel — become the “modernists” of the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy (07_01), and J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism (07_xx) would argue that liberalism is not a variety of Christianity at all but a different religion.

Lessons for Today

Schleiermacher’s temptation is perennial: to make the faith palatable by relocating its center to something the culture already prizes — experience, emotion, self-fulfillment. The lesson is that apologetic motives, however noble, must never purchase relevance at the price of revelation. The church commends Christ best not by reconstructing Him to suit her despisers but by proclaiming Him as He has made Himself known in His Word.