Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Snow and Schleiermacher

We got snow! Lots of it. Weird. First day of spring and the ground is covered for the first time in months.

Meanwhile, I'm slogging through an abudance of Schleiermacher. He is the guy who is credited with the diabolical origins of liberal theology - hiss, boo, snipe, snipe. He talks about "self-consciousness" and "god-consciousness" enough to get him a free pass into Terry Cole Whittaker's Science of the Mind!

I love him, though. He pushes so many important buttons. And he loves art. I just wonder if he was cute, too.

He is the guy who makes "experience" a fundamental category for theological reflection (don't you love how I worded that? So all "academic-ky"). And it's experience that I find riveting... yours, mine, ours.

More on that in this week's UPI column, I think.

Anyway, here's a tidbit of Schleiermacher while I sit in the snow for my parting thoughts:

The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
(Better translation might be: utter dependence)
For when it is the good that is under consideration, and the ethical object is predominant, truth must be considered more in reference to art than science, if, that is, unity is to be preserved in the work generally.

No God without a world, and no world without God.

And, moreover, it is art in its most general and comprehensive form that is here discussed, for the dialogue embraces everything connected with it, from its greatest object, the state, to its least, the embellishment of sensuous existence.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Schleiermacher? Geesh...get out and enjoy some sledding ;)

Bizarely here in mid-central Iowa we didn't get even an inch of snow, it all went south of us.

Enjoy the reading, but know that you're putting this recent seminary grad to shame. (We read OF his work rather than his actual work.)

Chuck said...

Great quotes! They really resonate with ideas from other authors and my own. Do you know if any of Schleiermacher's works are available online? I did a quick search but didn't find any. I like to load books into my PocketPC and read/annotate in that format - especially if the work is public domain. Right now my PocketPC is full of Teilhard de Chardin, G.K. Chesterton, and St. Augustine :-) Pretty interesting sources for an ex-Southern Baptist!

Now I'm excited about the UPI post...thanks!