Schleiermacher and the Feeling of Absolute Dependence

Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1799 On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers addressed an educated German audience that had grown embarrassed by institutional Christianity, arguing that they had misunderstood what religion actually is. Religion, Schleiermacher held, is neither a system of doctrine to be believed nor a code of conduct to be followed; it is a distinct mode of feeling, das schlechthinnige Abhaengigkeitsgefuehl, the feeling of utter or absolute dependence, the immediate pre-conceptual awareness of oneself as wholly grounded in something beyond oneself. Doctrine, on this account, is a second order attempt to put that feeling into words, always coming after the experience it describes rather than authorizing it from outside.

Schleiermacher developed the idea systematically three decades later in The Christian Faith, reworking the whole of Protestant dogmatics from this single starting point rather than from scripture or church confession taken as external authorities. The move set the terms every later liberal theologian in the German tradition worked within, and it is also exactly the move Karl Barth would spend his career reversing: for Barth, grounding theology in a human feeling, however profound, made God's Word answerable to human experience rather than the other way around.