Search Results

The chapter shows to what extent Schleiermacher's essay on election agrees with Augustine and Calvin that the ground of election and reprobation is not found in human beings but in God. Those who are captured by the power of God's Word are the elect, those who are not captured by it are the reprobate. Reprobation does not entail damnation; nobody ever loses the possibility of being spiritually revived. The exclusion from the community of believers is not the result of a divine foreordination but an expression of the historical development of God's kingdom. Schleiermacher rejects not only the idea of a positive divine decree of reprobation, as Lutheran theologians did in their quarrel with the Reformed side, but he refutes altogether the idea of particular decrees for individuals or for two different groups of persons. Election and reprobation are rooted in a single divine decree.

The chapter discusses the doctrine of election in the context of the Glaubenslehre. The concept of a single divine decree structures the argument throughout the book, and the content of the decree is a universal predestination to salvation in Christ. Christ's redemptive work is realized gradually and without miraculous leaps. The historical existence of believers and unbelievers does not result from a foreordained division of human beings. Divine mercy and righteousness pertain to every person; the idea of double predestination is rejected. Since the Christian church is the complete revelation of Christ's dignity, it is possible that every person will be included in the fellowship with him. Schleiermacher's position remains theocentric; predestination is defined in terms of divine omniscience and omnipotence, not in terms of redemption. Christ is the universal mediator of salvation, but his appearance in history does not contribute significantly to the determination of the divine decree.

The chapter argues that Karl Barth's Commentary on Romans questions the individualistic assumptions of traditional views. For Barth, as for Schleiermacher, predestination is a divine act that constitutes the unity of all human beings and not an absolute distinction between two kinds of persons. Every person is the object of God's universal judgment and grace, at once separated from and bound to God. The divine decision to elect or reprobate is not predetermined but occurs time and again in the historical event in which God's address leads to faith or to unbelief. Is Barth's thinking already ‘open toward the later characteristic christological centring of election’? He argues that humankind's reprobation is overcome in Christ because of Christ's resurrection from the dead, but he does not yet say that Christ's reconciling death is the result of God's self‐determination to be God in a covenant with humankind.

The chapter argues that the main theme of the doctrine of election in Karl Barth's Göttingen Dogmatics is the twofold possibility of faith and unbelief, which is an integral part of God's address to humanity. God's ‘unveiling’ is the purpose of His ‘veiling’, but the decision when and how the ‘unveiling’ occurs is made by God alone. Reprobation is the event in which God withholds the gift of faith, but it is not an end in itself and is always oriented toward election and salvation as the steadfast goal. Barth changes the concept of an eternal double predestination from a concept that refers to a pre‐temporal divine foreordination into an actualistic concept that refers to the freedom and contingency of God's acting in history. The modification underscores the theocentric and teleological character of his view.

The chapter shows how Barth's second revision of the doctrine, culminating in Church Dogmatics II/2, puts the doctrine on a new foundation. Predestination now is identical with the election of Jesus Christ. It is a primal decision, by which God determines not only humankind but also Himself, and a gracious choice, by which God chooses reprobation for Himself and election for human beings. The idea of Jesus Christ as the subject and object of election overcomes the traditional distinction between God's will in Jesus Christ and God's eternal will. Barth's second revision of the doctrine succeeds in defining election more concretely. The teleological view of reprobation and election is preserved, but with a new focus on Jesus Christ, the ‘atoning substitute’ (Schleiermacher). The christological revision leads to a consideration of the election of the congregation and of the individual, two topics neglected in the Göttingen Dogmatics.

This chapter surveys a wide range of historic works on marriage and family. The first two sections place Jesus' teaching against the family, Paul's indifference toward marriage and family, and the New Testament's household codes against the backdrop of the Greco-Roman emphasis on the family as the fundamental social cell. The following sections assess Augustine's affirmation of marriage in light of ambiguous patristic teaching, and medieval attempts to institutionalize marriage as a vocation roughly on a par with singleness. The final sections examine Reformation and Puritan themes, and three attempts by 19th-century theologians — Friedrich Schleiermacher, Horace Bushnell, and F. D. Maurice — to bolster the family in response to the rise of modern liberal social and political thought.

This chapter examines Barth's understanding of the nature and task of dogmatics, looking first at an informal but programmatic presentation he gave to faculty colleagues, followed by the prolegomena to his dogmatics lectures in Göttingen. Barth situates the task of dogmatics between a scholastic scientia de Deo, on the one hand, and a Schleiermacherian Religionswissenschaft, on the other. However, his eschatological focus makes it difficult to develop an account of dogmatics that avoids either making it part of the revelation event itself (along the lines of preaching), or opposing it to that event. The task of dogmatics is then to problematise the identity between preaching and the Word of God. In conclusion, a contrast is drawn with Barth's later lectures on John's Gospel, where his attention to the Johannine idea of witness encourages him to develop a more positive description of acts of human testimony to revelation.

This chapter explores Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 revival of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Matthaus-Passion). Musicologist Michael Marissen has argued that in preparing for the revival, Mendelssohn cut Bach's work to remove anti-Semitic references. It is shown instead that Mendelssohn's cuts were intended to make the work more accessible to a 19th-century audience that was largely unfamiliar with Bach's works. Mendelssohn's cuts were also similar to those of other Christian conductors who performed the work later, suggesting that he did not make his changes out of any lingering affinity for Judaism, or to lessen the work's anti-Semitism. Mendelssohn, in fact, was a close disciple of prominent Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who viewed Judaism as an outdated religion.

This chapter examines Browning's dramatic monologues in the light of his ideas about sympathy and theology, and his debt to Schleirmacher. Browning's poetry has been conventionally read as encouraging readers to sympathise with his fictional protagonists. Chapter 2 demonstrates that he complicates the fact of sympathizing, and presents writers, readers and protagonists as mimics and parodists, rather than true sympathizers. The chapter concludes with a close reading of ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’, demonstrating the relationship between these acts of failed sympathy, or mimicry, and Browning's belief in the incarnation.

This chapter examines the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher as a possible progenitor of contemporary theological anti-realism. It argues that Schleiermacher's treatment of Christian doctrines in The Christian Faith can be usefully compared to reductive anti-realism, and that there are aspects of his approach that mitigate the tendency towards reductivism. Properly understood Schleiermacher can be described as a theological anti-realist but only in a modest sense, and one which is predicated on his distinctive understanding of the duties of the theologian as much as on the nature of religious language. It is further argued that while there are useful lessons to be learned from Schleiermacher's theology, contemporary theologians are under no obligation to adopt his position on either religious language or the parameters of the theological enterprise.

Heidegger’s account of the impact of technologization on university life is borne out by recent developments. The background to Heidegger’s views in German debates about the nature of the university are explored, with reference to Schleiermacher’s contribution to the vision for Berlin University and Heidegger’s own involvement in the ‘co-ordination’ of Freiburg University with the Nazi state. The latter resembles the features of the contemporary management models being applied to universities, whilst the impact of inappropriate models of ‘science’ and research being imposed on the humanities, especially Religious Studies and Theology, is considered. Schleiermacher and Newman are used to sketch an alternative approach, emphasizing the complex space of university life with its multiple para-academic activities.

In the introductions to his lectures, Hegel orients himself to the culture, philosophy, and theology of his time. He takes account of the novelty of philosophy of religion as a discipline, arguing that its object is not only religion as an aspect of human experience but also the knowledge of God by reason alone; as such it is a necessary branch of philosophy. He provides an analysis of the characteristics of modernity, focusing on its secularism, agnosticism, and compartmentalization of religion, which together comprise ‘the discord of our times’. He assesses previous and concurrent theologies, which for the most part fail to address this discord: metaphysical or classical theology, rational theology (the Enlightenment), historical theology, agnostic and ethicotheology (Kant), theology of feeling (Schleiermacher, Jacobi), atheism (Feuerbach), pantheism (Spinoza).

The University of Berlin, founded in 1810 under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, is traditionally seen as the model institution of the 19th century. In fact the German system emerged from innovations both before and after 1810. Its features included the unity of teaching and research, the pursuit of higher learning in the philosophy faculty, freedom of study for students (Lernfreiheit, contrasted with the prescriptive curricula of the French system), the educational ideal of Bildung based on neo-humanist admiration for ancient Greece, corporate autonomy for universities despite their funding by the state, and the notion of academic freedom. The group of reformers in Prussia included philosophers like Fichte and Schleiermacher as well as Humboldt, and Berlin University was a focus of national cultural revival. The German model had a profound influence throughout central, eastern, and northern Europe.

This chapter sketches a genealogy of the religion of the contemporary rapprochement. Modern religion has its origins in the turn away from the biblical narrative and to natural philosophy among theologians and philosophers in the sixteenth century. The existence of God was tied during that time to the regnant philosophical and scientific discourses; when those discourses proclaimed themselves no longer in need of God as an explanatory apparatus, theology (as exemplified by the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher) turned to the thinking and feeling human subject as the basis for all religious belief. As Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out, however, the divinity described by this ontotheology could be explained as nothing more than a projection of deep human desire onto an imaginary being.

The author of this chapter teaches Jung's analysis of Christianity in her undergraduate religious studies courses at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire. Many of the students come from conservative Christian backgrounds, so their encounter with Jung's ideas regularly elicits strong responses and sometimes surprising transformations. As her chapter explains, the author has discovered that Jung's own methodological commitments provide the necessary tools for effective teaching in religious studies and other disciplines. In her classes, the students examine the epistemological, philosophical, and theological underpinnings of Jung's ideas, particularly in relation to Immanuel Kant's philosophy and Friedrich Schleiermacher's theology. This gives students a broader context in which to understand Jungian theory and their reactions to it. The chapter draws attention to possible problems and pitfalls generated by the arousal of cognitive dissonance in educational experience, such as when a lifelong Christian first encounters a psychological analysis of religious belief, and shares methods for avoiding those problems and transforming the students’ personal reactions into a positive force in religious studies pedagogy.

Chapter Nineteen traces Hodge’s final months in Europe, including the six months he spends in Berlin which he considers the highpoint of his trip. In Berlin he meets and befriends Ernst Hengstenberg and Johann Neander, and attends the lectures of Alexander Von Humboldt. He partakes of many “Awakening” evening sessions with friends. He then travels home via France, England and Scotland.

Chapter fifty-four examines the crowning achievement of Hodge’s publishing career, his three-volume Systematic Theology. Rather than simply compile and edit his theological writings of the past half century, Hodge took the opportunity to write his Systematic as an organic whole. Certain new stresses appear in the volumes. He emphasized Baconian scientific method and the role of the intellect in theological study to a degree that had not been the case in his theological lectures. He used his Systematic to argue for the importance of the intellect (over the emotions) in theological study, and he made his volumes and apologetic for God’s goodness and benevolent work in the world, even after the devastating events of the Civil War.