What Went Wrong?

What Went Wrong?
CHHI 302
Professor Joshua Earls

Steven R. Smith
Liberty University
Fall 2011

 
There were many Theologians at the beginning of the nineteenth century who dedicated themselves to answering the questions of religion such as its origin. One of these well-known figures involved in these discussions was Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher sought not only to bypass the origin of religion; he believed that religion should be examined from a more subjective approach, that of humanity.

German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher was born on November 21, 1768 in Breslau, Lower Silesia. His father served as a Chaplain during the Seven Year’s War in the King of Prussia’s military. Ten years later young Schleiermacher and his parents were made manifest of the teachings of a Moravian community in the city of Gnadenfrei. During this time Schleiermacher claimed to have had his first “conscious religious experience.”1

Schleiermacher studied under the Moravin Brethern of Niesky gaining from them an appreciation for the Latin and Greek classics and a strong sense of religion that influenced him throughout the rest of his life. As he became older Schleiermacher found the teaching of the Moravian Brethern too restrictive because the administrators had chosen to not participate in discourse of contemporary bias.
At the age of nineteen Friedrich became a student at Halle University studying the theory of such notable scholars as Immanuel Kant and Aristotle. Schleiermacher was ordained in 1794 and preached throughout Berlin, Germany until his death in 1834. During his life Freidrich was a champion of trying to advance a subjective approach to religious application. Author Theodore Ziolkowski described those times in Berlin as a “rising cultural metropolis,” It was the intellectual center of the German Enlightenment in Europe.2
The contemporary lifestyle and politically charged disputes of this city, which had a population of 500,000... [continues]

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