The Christian Faith
Der christliche Glaube — Schleiermacher's 1821-22 (revised 1830) systematic-dogmatic theology, the founding modern Protestant systematic theology
Tradition: Liberal Protestant theology
The founding modern Protestant systematic theology — Schleiermacher's reconstruction of Christian doctrine on the basis of religious self-consciousness
Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) is Schleiermacher's systematic-dogmatic theology — the founding modern Protestant systematic theology. The work's framework: Christian doctrine is the systematic articulation of the religious self-consciousness of the Christian community ("the feeling of absolute dependence" upon God, as that feeling is shaped by relation to Christ as Redeemer). The book is organised into Introduction (defining religion, theology, and the Christian church), Part I (doctrines presupposed in religious self-consciousness, including God's attributes, creation, providence), and Part II (doctrines arising from the consciousness of sin and redemption — Christology, sin, salvation, ecclesiology, eschatology). Foundational text of modern Protestant theology.
Author
Editions cited
- Der christliche Glaube (Berlin, 1821-22; substantially revised 2nd edn 1830-31); standard German critical edition KGA I.7 and I.13; English trans. The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (T&T Clark, 1928); recent edition Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice (2016)
School Embodiments
Founding text of modern Protestant systematic theology; principal source for nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal-Protestant doctrinal reflection.
"All Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech." (The Christian Faith, §15)
The framework of "feeling of absolute dependence" — the immediate self-consciousness as the foundation of religious experience — is phenomenological in inheritance.
"The common element in all... expressions of piety, by which they are conjointly distinct from all other feelings... is this: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent." (The Christian Faith, §4)
Schleiermacher wrote as a Reformed (Calvinist) theologian; The Christian Faith engages the Reformed dogmatic tradition extensively.
"The system here presented is in essential continuity with the Reformed confessional tradition, even where I depart from it on specific doctrines." (The Christian Faith, Preface)
The framework engages German idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) while preserving distinctive theological territory.
"What philosophy treats as self-consciousness, theology treats as religious self-consciousness; the two are not the same but they are related." (The Christian Faith)
Identifies the underlying structures — religious self-consciousness, Christian community — that produce visible Christian doctrine.
"Doctrines are not arbitrary constructions but the systematic articulation of what the Christian religious self-consciousness actually contains." (The Christian Faith)
Systematic-deductive structure: from the felt experience of absolute dependence, the entire dogmatic system is reconstructed.
"All Christian doctrines can be deduced from the proper analysis of the religious self-consciousness as modified by the consciousness of Christ as Redeemer." (The Christian Faith)
The grounding of theology in lived religious experience anticipates aspects of existentialist theology (Bultmann, Tillich).
"Doctrines must remain answerable to the actual texture of religious experience." (The Christian Faith)
Internal Tensions
Karl Barth's 1922 Romans commentary and subsequent dialectical theology defined themselves substantially in opposition to Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependence" framework; the Schleiermacher-Barth debate has organised modern Protestant theology for a century. Recent rehabilitations (Gerrish, Williams, Mariña) have substantially restored Schleiermacher's standing.
I. Time
The historical-developmental time of Christian doctrine; the present time of the Christian community whose self-consciousness the theology articulates.
Attributes
II. Space
The Berlin academic-ecclesial space where Schleiermacher taught; the broader Protestant world the work shaped.
Attributes
III. Matter
The embodied Christian community; the institutional church.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Christian believer whose religious self-consciousness is the data; the theologian who systematises it.
Attributes
V. Energy
The religious-spiritual energies of the Christian community; the intellectual energies of systematic theology.
Attributes
VI. Information
The Christian doctrines as systematic articulation of religious self-consciousness.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Christian Faith resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.