Reconceiving Theology after the Anthropological Turn: The Doctrine of God in Friedrich Schleiermacher's "The Christian Faith"

Abstract

This study consists of a reconstruction and evaluation of the Doctrine of God in Friedrich Schleiermacher's primary theological work, Der christliche Glaube. The study proceeds by following a method of close reading of primary texts, interpreting those texts in conversation with major secondary literature in both English and German. It begins by examining the intellectual context in which Schleiermacher produced his Doctrine of God, primarily attending to the significance of Immanuel Kant, especially his deconstruction of the traditional "proofs" of God's existence and the attendant implications for speech about God in his critical philosophy. The study then looks at Schleiermacher's theological method, that is, the way he authorized and grounded speech about the divine being by following Kant's turn to the subject but analyzing human subjectivity in distinctive ways. Interpretations of Schleiermacher's theological method that represent influential streams of interpretation in the history of reception are examined and critiqued before a unique formulation of Schleiermacher's theological method is offered on the basis of a close analysis of the Introduction of Der christliche Glaube. Finally, the study proceeds to reconstruct Schleiermacher's doctrine of God by following the distributed parts of the doctrine across of the material dogmatics. The sense in which speech about the divine being is authorized as well as the distinct understanding of divine attributes is discussed in the context of the First Part of the material dogmatics, where the divine being is analysed as absolute causality and specified in particular ways. The final chapter then follows Schleiermacher's turn to the analysis of the divine being as it is "self-communicated" in the Redeemer, revealing the divine being as love. Potential difficulties with this formulation are analysed, including the possibility that this Second Part of the material dogmatics represents a radical enough shift in method from the First Part as to be fundamentally incompatible with it. Finally, the concluding discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity is examined, including the sense in which Schleiermacher's theology might be said to be triune.