When Barth and Schleiermacher Kiss: Part 1, Setting the Table

Goodness, how obscure is that title?

Before you run away, just know that I'm about to explain it in a very accessible way.

To begin, this is a series about how I approach theology. To do that I want to explore how I attempt to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable theological visions. And as you can guess, the "Barth" and "Schleiermacher" in my title represent these rival theologies. 

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was a German theologian and philosopher often called the “father of modern liberal theology.” Seeking to defend Christianity in the face of Enlightenment criticism and rising secularism, Schleiermacher located the heart of religion not in doctrine or morality but in the “feeling of absolute dependence,” a deep, immediate awareness of God. Simply put, Schleiermacher grounded faith in human experience, a move that laid the foundation for modern liberal theology. When I was an undergraduate Bible major, I was warned about the liberalism of “German theology.” Schleiermacher was the godfather of this movement, which later boasted theologians like Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), and, in a later and more complicated form, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). While this is a very crude simplification, these liberal theologians unpacked Christian dogma in moral, historical, existential, symbolic, and experiential terms. The Christian faith and the Bible increasingly functioned as expressions of human religious consciousness and the human condition, rather than as descriptions of a supernatural, ontological reality.

Simply put, the leading edge of liberal theology is human experience. So, the reference to "Schleiermacher" in the series title is gesturing toward theological frameworks that privilege and emphasize human experience. 

In 1919, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth published his famous commentary on Romans. The Romans commentary was described as "a bomb the fell on the playground of the theologians." The theologians in question were those liberal, German, Schleiermacherian theologians. Barth’s Romans rejected the entire liberal theological trajectory. For Barth, God was Wholly Other from human existence, the Lord who confronts humanity in judgment and grace. Revelation, thus, does not grow out of history or emerge from within the human condition, but breaks in from beyond, as crisis and apocalypse. Barth took explicit aim at Schleiermacher’s "turn to the subject," wrenching theology free from its captivity to human experience and returning it to the sovereign, self-revealing act of God in Christ. 

Simply stated, for Barth revelation doesn’t emerge from within human experience, as a dawning awareness of a “Christ consciousness” or inner moral feeling. Rather, Christ confronts human experience from the outside, as crisis, judgment, and indictment. So, the reference to "Barth" in the series title is gesturing toward theological frameworks that privilege and emphasize special revelation—Scripture, dogma, and doctrine—over human experience. 

Hopefully, now, you can see the provocation of my title "When Barth and Schleiermacher Kiss." I'm proposing in this series an intimate reconciliation between two opposed and fiercely warring theological systems, Barth and Schleiermacher's own visions and all their contemporary theological offspring. For example, I toyed with entitling the series "When Hauerwas and Tillich Kiss." Hauerwas as a contemporary example of the Barthian stream, and Tillich an example of the Schleiermacherian stream. In March 1959, Time magazine placed Paul Tillich on its cover, calling him the “foremost Protestant thinker” in the United States. In September 2001, Time named Stanley Hauerwas “America’s Best Theologian.” As for the ongoing war between these two streams of Christian theology, Hauerwas has called Tillich, as a liberal theologian, "the most supremely apologetic/accomodationist theologian of our time" and "the great enemy of Christianity in this country." So, imagining Hauerwas and Tillich kissing would have been quite the provocation. But I wanted to go back to the origins of liberal theology—Schleiermacher—and its early, fiercest, and most influential critic—Karl Barth. 

A sketch of where we are going. 

I often feel that I am a theological platypus. I'm in-between a lot. Too Barthian for the progressives. Too Schleiermacherian for the conservatives. Too heterodox for the orthodox, and too orthodox for the heterodox. I am a huge fan of both Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Tillich. In fact, as I'll try to argue in this series, I think Hauerwas and Tillich need each other. Otherwise their theological visions, and this is also true for Barth and Schleiermacher, become twisted and distorted. 

Thus, the need for these visions—Barth/Schleiermacher and Hauerwas/Tillich—to kiss.