Friedrich Schleiermacher Quotes on God
Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) and the systematic Christian Faith (1821, revised 1830) gave nineteenth-century Protestant theology its founding philosophical statement. The principal thesis is that religion is not a species of metaphysics or morality (the two it had been reduced to in the Enlightenment critique) but a distinct mode of consciousness — the feeling of absolute dependence — whose proper object is the divine reality on which the finite self knows itself to depend. The framework reorganized academic theology around the analysis of religious experience and shaped the entire subsequent liberal Protestant tradition through Ritschl, Troeltsch, and the early Barth (against whom the dialectical theology eventually reacted).
Quotes
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Attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher:
“Religion is the feeling of absolute dependence.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher:
“The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher:
“Every man has been made by God for religion.”
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“Him pervaded the Cosmic Spirit, the Infinity was his beginning and his end, the Universe his only and everlasting love. In holy innocence and deep humility he beheld himself mirrored in the eternal world, and perceived how himself was its most amiable mirror. Full of religion was he and full of Holy Spirit. Wherefore he stands there, alone and unequalled a master of his art, but sublime above the profane rabble, a peerless beacon forever.”
Friedrich Schleiermacher, on Spinoza, as quoted by Cornelius Lanczos in Albert Einstein and the Cosmic World Order (1962), -
“But the imparting of religion is not to be sought in books, like that of intellectual conceptions and scientific knowledge. The pure impression of the original product is too far destroyed in this medium, which, in the same way that dark-colored objects absorb the greatest proportion of the rays of light, swallows up everything belonging to the pious emotions of the heart, which cannot be embraced”
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On The Social Element in Religion (1799), The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries , Volume 5 -
“Second Speech: The Nature of Religion". On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers . London: Paul, Trench, Trubner. 1893. p. 23.”
Miracle is simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant. To me all is miracle.