Schleiermacher and Palmer

The Father and Mother of the Modern Protestant Mindset

Justin A. Davis

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532667336, 9781532667343
• eBook ISBN: 9781532667350
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Twenty-first-century Protestantism is radically different from the Protestantism of the Reformation. The challenges of modernity affected all aspects of Christianity and the more successful attempts to combat these challenges came about as a result of two rather different yet similar theologians in the nineteenth century. This work provides an exhaustive look at Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern liberal Protestantism, and Phoebe Palmer, the mother of the Holiness movement. The trend of liberalism is to strip away all but what is essential to Christian life, while the Holiness movement sought to make all of life applicable to the Bible and God. While these two movements may appear contradictory, they are grounded in a shared source of experiential Protestantism, commonly known as Pietism, and develop their theological systems from this starting point. This study includes not only their theologies, but also biographies that introduce the reader to these two luminaries. Liberalism and holiness, as created by Schleiermacher and Palmer, lay the foundation for Pentecostalism, fundamentalism, neo-orthodoxy, and the interdenominational movements of the nineteenth century. Only from this vantage can we understand the modern Protestant mindset.

I

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)

Training in Pietism, Enlightenment, and Romanticism

“A Christian child is welcomed with love and joy, and ever remains embraced by them, furnishes a guarantee that the Spirit of God will dwell in that child.”1

Schleiermacher was the unlikely hero for many reasons. The first and most obvious reason is his lineage. While in Prussia, the Schleiermacher’s were not Lutheran, but Reform. This confessional identity suited the Hohenzollerns, although the vast majority of Prussia, including the only major university, remained Lutheran. In many ways Friedrich was destined to become a pastor. He was the eldest son of an eldest son, and third in a line of Reformed preachers. His paternal grandfather, Daniel Schleiermacher, born 1695, was at odds with both the Lutheran majority of Prussia and the Reform minority. Daniel was charged with sorcery and witchcraft in 1749. The charge came about due to some unfortunate associations he made with some Rhenish sectarians, a quasi-Pietistic group. Daniel’s wife and son Gottlieb were forced to testify against him. To avoid incarceration, Daniel fled to Holland, where he stayed with his sister Arnheim. Following the trial he never preached again. Daniel Schleiermacher died in exile.

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s father Gottlieb fared better than his father. By all accounts he was an exceptionally bright child, completing his theological training by nineteen. Following the Rhenish sectarians demise, Gottlieb chose to become a teacher in Magdeburg in 1758. It was at this time that he distanced himself from his father’s Pietism and grew increasingly attracted to the Enlightenment. It was good timing to shift ideological allegiances. The Hohenzollern dynasty was moving away from the piety of Frederick Wilhelm I, to the Enlightenment supporting Frederick II. A dozen years later in 1760, Gottlieb began serving as a chaplain in the Prussian army, during the middle of the Seven Years War. Shortly after the war Gottlieb married Katharina-Maria Stubenrauch.

Katharina-Maria Stubenrauch was the daughter of a Reformed pastor, Samuel Ernst Timotheus Stubenrauch, a professor of theology at Halle. Little is known about the life of Katharina-Maria. The brief mentions of her focus on two areas. The first concern her death. The remaining accounts concern her deep piety and her love for her three children. The first of Gottlieb and Katharina’s children was a daughter named Charlotte (1765–1831). Friedrich (1768–1834) was the second child, born November 21, and often referred to his older sister as Lotte. The youngest of the three was Carl, born in 1772.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was so named in honor of his grandfathers and the monarch. Daniel was given to honor his paternal grandfather. While Daniel Schleiermacher was discarded and in exile, Gottlieb still wanted to honor his father. Daniel was also the absentee godfather to Friedrich when he was baptized on the sixth day on November 27. Ernst was taken from Katharina-Maria’s father, surprisingly it was not his first name, Samuel. A possible connection exists with Daniel Ernest Jablonsky, the Moravian Bishop in Berlin in 1737 who met with Count Nikolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. While it is unlikely that Friedrich was named in honor of the Moravian bishop still a decade out from his father’s conversion, there may be an intentional connection heretofore unnoticed. The name Friedrich was derived from Gottlieb’s affinity for the Prussian monarch who he served under in the Seven Years War.

Gottlieb’s fondness for Frederick II likely waned in 1778. Gottlieb distanced himself from his father’s version of Pietism in his youth and embraced the Aufklärung. From April to June of 1778 the Prussian troops to which Gottlieb was the chaplain were quartered in Gnadenfrei. While in Gnadenfrei, Gottlieb encountered a Moravian community that transformed the pastor’s spiritual understanding. This experience was a change to a full belief in Christ as the Son of God and reconciler of human beings to God. Gottlieb’s spiritual journey moved from schismatic Pietist to Enlightenment theologian to Moravian, one of the established Pietist groups whose spiritual legacy traces back to Zinzendorf. Gottlieb never formally joined the group. This was likely due to his fear of ending up like his father and being incriminated through formal associations. His forced testimony incriminating his father was not a lesson he would soon forget.

Friedrich was now ten years old, but his future was bound with his father’s new conversion. For the next five years Friedrich, his sister, and his brother internalized their father’s conversion. Each did so in a different manner. Friedrich, like his father, was inquisitive and bright from a very early age. His mother recalled that “that he began to read at the age of four; and while other children played games, he busied himself with translating French and Latin.” His brother Carl was not as bookish as his older brother. According to their mother “Fritz is all spirit, and Carl all body.”2 The young Friedrich likely focused on the spirit rather than the body because his own body was not very strong. Friedrich had poor health. He was nearsighted and had a number of stomach disorders that bothered him most of his life. He was also noticeably short and overall a diminutive adult.

Katharina-Maria became ill in 1783. Unsure how to best care for the children, the decision was made to send them to a Moravian boarding school at Niesky, furthering their Pietist education. The three children packed up and arrived in Niesky on June 14. They never saw their mother again as she died on November 17 1783. Niesky was the logical place to send the children. The Moravian school sought to keep the students away from the evil world. The best way to do so was a strict program filled with pious activities. This Moravian school resembled the schools instituted by another Pietist leader, August Hermann Francke, in many respects. Francke was well known for reforming religious education in Glaucha, the slums outside of Halle. The one noticeable exception was the church services resembled the long and numerous liturgies of the Moravians rather than the strict promethean Lutheran Pietism which Francke advocated. Every day there were four services and students were expected to go to confession once a month as well as take communion at least that often.

Though Friedrich’s time here was short, only two years, it was rather influential in shaping the life of the adolescent. It was at this school where he became a Moravian both outwardly and inwardly. It was here that the experience of experiential Christianity was finally grasped by Friedrich. He marks this time as the “birthdate of his higher life.” The letters that survive from this time are filled with the talk about the Savior’s love, his unworthiness, and how he longs for a deeper spiritual experience. Schleiermacher’s conversion took place along similar lines to Francke. Both had a period of adolescent rebellion only to have a born again experience. While Francke records a specific prayer that launched his conversion we do not have a clear statement of a conversion experience from Schleiermacher. If Schleiermacher did not undergo a Francke style conversion experience, he likely deepened his faith at this time following the example of John Wesley or Zinzendorf. The central change focused on his understanding of his connection to Jesus as his personal savior.

In 1785 he transferred to the Moravian theological seminary at Barby. Accompanied by ten other graduates, they began the rather long walk in September. After taking only five days to traverse the hundred and fifty miles, they arrived on September 22. Schleiermacher was now in the center of Moravian theology. The school had 225 students, and was filled with Moravian theologians and pastors. The purpose of Schleiermacher’s attendance at Barby was ordination. Barby was farther away from Niesky than the hundred and fifty miles, at least for Friedrich. While he was still enthused by his religious awakenings at Niesky and still held an affinity for the Moravians, outside influences crept in.

The two prevailing and destructive influences were Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The school viewed these thinkers as damaging to the spiritual wellbeing of the students and attempted to silence these competing ideologies. The lure of the Aufklärung, which gripped his father, now gripped him. Friedrich found a group of fellow students who smuggled in these works and developed their own educational program. This new underground program did not focus on Zinzendorf, rather their attention was solely Kant and Goethe. Kant’s lure was his radical distinction between the knowledge of the world on the one hand and religion on the other. Kant’s positive conception of religion reordered theology for Schleiermacher. Goethe’s writing was so deep and nuanced that Friedrich found a new literary hero. Both Kant and Goethe appeared so full of life and hope that even the Moravian theology appeared as an arid metaphysic to Friedrich.

Eventually the schools requested Friedrich and the others to leave in 1787. In many ways it was already too late. Schleiermacher penned his father several times throughout the two years he was in Barby. On one occasion he hinted to his father that “his teachers fail to deal with those widespread doubts that trouble so many young people of the present day.”3 His father did not understand that the doubts belonged to Friedrich. The letter Friedrich composed in January of 1786 left little room concerning whose doubts the teachers overlooked. Friedrich wrote his father informing him of his radical turn of faith. Friedrich believed that reason must accompany faith and began to deny many Moravian doctrines. The most troublesome doctrine to Friedrich was the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Gottlieb reacted in a passionate repudiation of his son, calling Friedrich a denier of God. Eventually this paternal condemnation was rescinded. Father and son reunited as pastors and preachers, but likely not in person before Gottlieb’s death on ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)
• Chapter 2: Theology of Schleiermacher
• Chapter 3: Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874)
• Chapter 4: Theology of Palmer
• Chapter 5: Holiness, Pentecostals, and Liberalism
• Chapter 6: Fundamentalism and Neo-Orthodoxy
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography