The most influential German
theologian of the 19th c., F. D. E. Schleiermacher is generally regarded as
the father of modern Protestant thought. A Calvinist by heritage, he was
educated in Moravian & Lutheran schools, studied the philosophy of Kant
and became a protégé of F. von Schlegel, leader of the Romantic literary
circle at Berlin.
Schleiermacher was the first
Calvinist invited to teach at the Lutheran University of Halle (1804) &
the first theologian appointed to the newly founded University of Berlin
(1810). An ardent ecumenist, he championed the Prussian union of Lutheran
& Calvinist churches.
In an era when religion was
identified with creeds & dogmas which many intellectuals rejected,
Schleiermacher defined religion as "feeling & intuition of the
universe" & Christianity as the individual's personal "feeling
of dependence" on God, a definition that influenced Protestant liberals
& pietists alike. His major works ---
On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) & The
Christian Faith (1822) ---
are still referred to in Protestant seminary curricula, in spite of critiques
by prominent 20th c. scholars, such as Karl Barth.
Schleiermacher held that Jesus
was a real human being in the full sense, but was distinct from other humans
in his consciousness of the immediacy of God's presence within him. Thus, from
1819-1832 Schleiermacher shifted the focus of his lectures on Christology from
dogmas to the portraits of Jesus in the gospels. These lectures were delivered
extemporaneously. But 30 years after his death they were reconstructed from
students' notes and published as The Life of Jesus.
More than most biblical
scholars of his time, Schleiermacher stressed the irreconcilable historical
differences between the synoptic gospels & the gospel of John. But unlike
most biblical scholars before or since, he argued that John provided better
insight into Jesus than the synoptics:
The Gospel of John everywhere
presents itself as one originating from an immediate eyewitness. In contrast
with this the others' compilation [of their narratives] from single elements
is subject to comparable doubt. All three, without exception, are
seen as coming to us second hand./note/
Schleiermacher's
conviction that the canonical gospel of
Matthew, like
Mark &
Luke, depends
on earlier reports was based on his own research "On
the Witness of Papias
about our First Two Gospels" (1817). He
was the first scholar to draw a distinction between the Greek narrative
ascribed to Matthew and the Hebrew sayings collection that Papias
ascribed to that apostle. He concluded that both were given the same name
because the author of the narrative used Matthew's collection of sayings as a
primary source.
Schleiermacher also
distinguished the canonical gospel of Mark from the source that Papias
ascribed to an associate of Peter. Thus, for him the synoptic gospels were all
composed of stories & sayings that were formed by previous tradition
rather than by eyewitness reports of events. Later form critics
& redaction critics confirmed this insight. But
very few scholars shared his conviction that the gospel of John preserved
reliable first hand testimony. While Schleiermacher himself retained the
traditional view that Matthew was the earliest synoptic gospel, his contention
that synoptic gospel writers had access to two primitive sources --- one a
narrative & one a sayings collection --- paved the way for
C.
H. Weisse to formulate the Two Source hypothesis.
* Note:
citation from D. F. Strauss The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A
Critique of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus (1865; ET Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1977), p. 41 (italics mine). For clearer reading, I have
divided L. Keck's translation of the single German sentence into three.
[For
analysis of Schleiermacher's contribution to the development of the Two
Document hypothesis see W. R. Farmer The Synoptic Problem (NY:
Macmillan Co., 1964) p. 15]
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