Based on his dissertation, Hoffman’s personal interest is tied to his own efforts in holding together faith and intellectual inquiry; and an encounter with Schleiermacher’s biography showed parallels to his own life. “It turned out that I had more in common with him than I thought,” Hoffman said. “The faith in which he was raised, like my own, was this deep ‘heart religion.’ Later, when I was a philosophy major in undergrad, there were some things I just didn’t know how to answer, and Schleiermacher gave me an opportunity to walk with him as he worked through those challenges.”
Born in Breslau in Prussian Silesia, Friedrich Schleiermacher was a German Reformed theologian, philosopher, pastor, and biblical scholar known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity. Because of his impact on later Christian thought, he is often called “the Father of Modern Liberal Theology” and is regularly associated with a broad range of subsequent theological developments, for good or for ill. Because of the complexity of his thought and his appropriation by various theological movements, interpretations of Schleiermacher are nearly as numerous as his readers. Quoting early 20th-century theologian Karl Barth who spearheaded the neo-orthodoxy movement, Hoffman said, “One is never finished with Schleiermacher.”
Hoffman felt that Schleiermacher’s reputation as a pseudo-iconoclast is unearned, and his words and ideas are often misinterpreted to support movements to which he himself would not have belonged. His book aims to assess Schleiermacher on his own terms, rather than treating him as simply a champion or villain of modern theology.
As an example, Hoffman pointed to interpretations of Schleiermacher’s position on the divinity of Christ. “He does believe in Christ’s divine nature, but he’s trying to get away from more traditional substance metaphysics,” he explained. “He’s trying to say, ‘No, He is divine,’ but he interprets what we mean by divine nature in a way that some will take to mean, ‘He’s just human like the rest of us.’ But Schleiermacher doesn’t think that.”
The central question in Hoffman’s book, however, isn’t whether Schleiermacher would or wouldn’t have supported contemporary theologies. Rather, he explores what theology can say about God — and by what method — while taking modern philosophy seriously. Hoffman describes Schleiermacher as grounding religion in a deep, pre-reflective relationship with God, rather than merely in beliefs or actions.
To do so, Hoffman establishes Kant’s contribution to the conversation. “Kant’s putting reason on trial to see what it can and can’t do,” he said. “He radically shrinks what reason is capable of talking about, and says reason presumes to be able to talk about a whole bunch of things it can’t.”
Hoffman said Schleiermacher recognizes some ways that Kant is probably correct, “but also the challenge this is for the church. If Kant is right, how do we talk about God at all? Because”, he said with a humorless laugh, “we kind of need to.”
But the Prussian theologian would take a novel approach to finding this language. Schleiermacher, he said, distinguished devotional expression from doctrinal theology. “He actually thinks that popular-level speech — like poetry and song — is a higher form of speech about God, because it directly expresses something of our intimate devotion and connection to the divine. If given the choice between singing a worship song or writing a poem of praise verses scientific, theological doctrine, you should write the poem, sing the song.”
Hoffman sees value in Schleiermacher’s insistence that God’s attributes are not distinct pieces of God, while criticizing his dismissive treatment of the Old Testament and acknowledging that his theological system can seem too neat. “These qualities are not separate in God. It’s not as though, if we gather all the qualities of God into a single list, we will arrive at who God is. What God is, in Himself, is undivided.”
“He adds layer upon layer,” Hoffman continued, “of what we can say about God until, by the end of his book, ‘The Christian Faith,’ the primary characteristics of God are love and wisdom, seen in the person of the Redeemer, Jesus. The culmination of which is the Trinity.”
