Friedrich Schleiermacher 1768 – 1834

Friedrich Schleiermacher was a German theologian and philosopher, often regarded as the father of modern Protestant theology and modern hermeneutics. His Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers reframed religion as neither doctrine nor morality but the immediate consciousness of absolute dependence on the infinite. His lectures on hermeneutics generalized the discipline beyond the interpretation of sacred texts to the understanding of any meaningful expression. He produced the first complete German translation of Plato's dialogues and helped to found the University of Berlin.

Friedrich Schleiermacher was born in 1768 in Breslau, the son of a Reformed army chaplain. Educated at the Moravian schools of Niesky and Barby, he broke with their pietism, studied at the University of Halle, and was ordained in 1794. As Reformed preacher at the Charite hospital in Berlin from 1796 he entered the circle of the early Romantics, including Friedrich Schlegel, and developed the literary voice that he would carry into philosophy and theology.

His major works include On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), Soliloquies (1800), the Outline of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory (1803), the great translation of Plato's dialogues into German (1804-1828, partly completed), the systematic dogmatics The Christian Faith (1821-1822, second edition 1830-1831), and the lectures on hermeneutics, dialectics, and aesthetics published from his papers after his death. With Wilhelm von Humboldt he helped found the new University of Berlin in 1810 and was its first dean of theology.

Schleiermacher defined religion as the feeling of absolute dependence and remade Protestant theology around the experience of pious self-consciousness rather than dogmatic propositions; he is at the same time the founder of modern hermeneutics, treating understanding as a general art that confronts the gap between author and reader. He died at Berlin in 1834 of a lung infection, mourned as the leading public theologian of the Prussian state.