Schleiermacher came to his Romanticism after losing his faith in Moravian
Pietism. He grew up at a Moravian boarding school, where he had a
conversion experience and cultivated a heartfelt, Christ-centered piety. But
despite their best efforts, the Moravians failed to protect him from modern
ideas, as his father had hoped. At age 21 he writes to his father, saying he can
no longer believe the doctrines of incarnation and vicarious atonement.
Schleiermacher’s systematic theology is a science of Christian piety. In 1811
Schleiermacher helped found the University of Berlin, where he became
professor of theology. Christ was central to Schleiermacher because Christ
has perfect God-consciousness. His foundational concept is the feeling of
absolute dependence, which is the consciousness of God contained in our
own self-consciousness. Since our God-consciousness is imperfect, hindered
by excessive consciousness of ¿ nite things (for example, lust and greed), we
suffer from sin-consciousness. Redemption in Christ means that we receive
from the church, through preaching, an impression of Christ’s perfect God-
consciousness, which works inwardly to overcome our sin-consciousness.
Schleiermacher thus initiates a tradition of Christocentric Liberal theology,
in which the personality of Jesus is fundamental, and the quest for the
historical Jesus is inevitable.
Liberal theology in the 19th century spent a great deal of time thinking
about the historical Jesus. The crucial difference between 18th- and 19th-
century biblical criticism is the acute historical consciousness of the 19th
century. Like the Deists, historical critics in the 19th century felt that much
of the biblical tradition of Jesus was added by the church and, therefore, not
historically accurate. This means that much of the Bible can be left behind,
relegated to the past.
At the same time, Liberal theology needed a Jesus who could be the basis of
modern religion. The result, Albert Schweitzer famously argued at the end of
the century, was that Jesus was a “Jesus of their own making.” The problem,
of course, is that Jesus in many ways was incompatible with the German
Christian ideal. Ŷ