Schleiermacher on religion: The individual and the social in Friedrich Schleiermacher's writings on religion

This dissertation addresses itself to the charge that religion according to Schleiermacher is a purely 'private, internal and individual affair'. It argues that this is a misrepresentation which persists due to an tradition of secondary literature which rarely engages his texts. The dissertation traces the history of this way of representing Schleiermacher's account of religion from its origins in Hegel's polemic against his chief opponent on the Berlin faculty, through the work of his followers, and into representations of the history of theology within the emerging discipline of the 'study of religion', and also critically examines Rudolf Otto's relationship to Schleiermacher (chapter 1). It then surveys a number of Schleiermacher's texts in order to reconstruct his understanding of the phenomenon of religion. Early essays from the 1790s, on the subject of freedom and the philosophy of Spinoza, are examined first (chapter 2), followed by the first edition of the Speeches on Religion (chapter 3), Schleiermacher's lectures on ethics and the second edition of the Speeches (chapter 4), and his mature dogmatics, The Christian Faith (chapter 5). In the summary chapter (chapter 6) it is argued that Schleiermacher's interest in religion's 'internal' side, which has drawn the attention of most of his commentators, stands in a delicate balance with his considerable interest in the external social and historical dynamics of religious communities. Rather than representing religion as something 'purely private and individual', that is, Schleiermacher sought to combine two perspectives on religion: one which took the particular character of its 'internal' side seriously, and one which saw religion as an outworking of the fundamental dynamics of human sociability. Schleiermacher thus strove to be both a Christian theologian and a 'theorist of religion' in something very like a contemporary sense.