This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The school of theology Friedrich Schleiermacher founded on the claim that religion is rooted in feeling rather than doctrine did not end with him. Through the nineteenth century, theologians including Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack carried his approach forward, treating religious experience and the historical development of Christian consciousness, rather than fixed doctrinal propositions, as theology's proper subject matter.
That confidence, that human culture and religious experience stood in essential continuity with divine revelation, defined Liberal Theology as a movement for roughly a century after Schleiermacher's 1834 death, shaping how an entire generation of Protestant scholars approached scripture, doctrine and the church's relationship to modern thought.
The reaction came in the twentieth century. Karl Barth and the Neo-Orthodox theologians who followed him rejected the Schleiermacher tradition's central premise, arguing that grounding theology in human religious experience had left it unable to resist the surrounding culture's pressures, and reasserted the priority of revelation over experience, a break deliberately framed against Schleiermacher's own starting point.
The two-part story, a school that shaped Protestant theology for a century and a sharp twentieth century reaction against its founding premise, is why Schleiermacher's influence is measured as much by what came after him as by his own books.