Schleiermacher’s Interpretation of the Bible

The Doctrine and Use of the Scriptures in the Light of Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical Principles

Ian S. Wishart

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666713787
  9781666713794
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666713800
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Schleiermacher was a preacher, a clergyman of the Reformed Church in Germany, based in Berlin. He was also a popular author and teacher. Karl Barth described him first as a pastor, then a professor, and last of all a philosopher. He was controversial and remains controversial in all of these roles. He remains a seminal thinker, a pioneer in seeking to make Christianity speak with a modern voice. He addressed nineteenth-century Germany. He raised issues relevant to the twenty-first century. His best known works are On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (1822), but little attention has been paid to his sermons, although he preached regularly to large congregations for over thirty years. This book is a glimpse at Schleiermacher in the pulpit.

1

Introduction and Background

Interpretation of the Bible is often considered to be the task of communicating the message of the Scriptures in an age whose thought and common life have little in common with ancient Palestine. The problem of communication is a problem of media: Should the church not employ modern media of data-processing and electronic systems to reshape the minds of men and women in conformity with the Christian ethic, or should the individual Christian not conclude that the time for words is past, and by direct action demonstrate what God’s love for suffering humankind may mean in some particular area of human life?

Schleiermacher, long before the age of McLuhan or Leger, had thought deeply about the problems of communicating the gospel and the medium of communication, and he had an answer set out in principle which he elaborated in his own practice. The church lives by preaching; in proclamation a Christian gives expression to the personal consciousness of God, and, insofar as being an official spokesperson of the church, gives expression to the common consciousness of the Christian community. This proclamation germinates in the consciousness of the hearer, stimulates there a consciousness of God, of sin and redemption, and issues in action, which is the ethical result of faith.

For Schleiermacher, there is a deeper problem than that of communication involved in the task of interpretation. This is the problem of understanding. Interpretation seen as communication is an active proceeding; seen as understanding, it is a receptive task. Hearing the proclamation of the gospel does not necessarily result in understanding; reading the text of the Bible does not necessarily issue in faith. Understanding is the result of conscious intention, a fact that we often overlook when we read or listen. Because the New Testament is written in Greek, the Old Testament in Hebrew, and the thought forms of both are foreign to us, we are forced to face consciously the problem of understanding with respect to them. However, the necessity of constant translation from the thought-pattern of one person to that of another is, in Schleiermacher’s view, necessary for the understanding of all communication, even in such simple examples as reading a letter or engaging in conversation. This work of translation is the essential basis of understanding, and the principles by which it proceeds are the principles of hermeneutics.

Schleiermacher regarded the task of interpreting the New Testament as the same, in principle, as the task of interpreting any other literary work. Because of its nature as a work written by Jewish authors living in a Hellenistic world, it has peculiar problems associated with it, requiring special hermeneutical solutions. Because of its nature as the expression of apostolic faith, it has a unique place which sets it apart from all other writings. However, the problem of interpreting it is a problem of understanding. To understand it, we must learn its language and structure, the circumstances of its composition and transmission, the purposes for which it was written, and the meaning which it had for those who wrote it and for those who read it. We need to study the New Testament extensively and intensively, learning the grammatical and historical details about its composition, and also the inner characteristics which make the book unique. Schleiermacher rejected the idea of interpreting the New Testament in the light of an exterior dogmatic principle of unity in thought and composition. He sought to understand the various New Testament authors individually, yet behind them to see a larger unity which was the life they shared in common, the life and spirit of Christ.

This study is concerned with Schleiermacher’s interpretation of the Bible. As such, it is the interpretation of an interpretation, an attempt to understand the biblical understanding of a nineteenth-century theologian. It is an attempt to deal with one aspect of his thought in accordance with his own principles. As a result, it is necessary to place this aspect of his thought in the setting of his life and general theology. Schleiermacher’s interpretation of the Bible was not an accidental circumstance of his life, nor a casual aspect of this thought: when he was speaking of the Bible, he was not talking about the weather. To understand his approach to interpretation, it is necessary to remember that Schleiermacher was a professional theologian, not of the kind whose whole attention is taken by the building of a system, but one who was concerned with philosophy and general literature, who was active in political life at a time of revolutionary change, who took part in the public leadership of the church, and who preached most Sundays of his life, from the time when he came to Berlin as a young man until his death thirty-eight years later. Biblical interpretation was a very practical task, grounded in the necessities of classroom and pulpit. But it was no mere professional task. Dogmatics and preaching were both founded on the proposition that they gave expression to the true thought of their author; both were essentially functions of the church, whereby it transmitted its message of faith. Thus, Schleiermacher’s interpretation is an exposition of his own religion, a personal testimony to his faith, and a part of his attempt to communicate that faith both to his fellow Christians and to the cultured despisers of all religion.

In principle, a proper consideration of Schleiermacher would deal with all sides of his life, and within it seek to outline the productive center of thinking and the method which leads from the central conceptions to secondary thoughts.

An extensive treatment of Schleiermacher’s writing has never been attempted, most interpreters being content to confine their attention to a narrow group of works on general theology and philosophy. This study cannot deal with all of Schleiermacher’s writing, not even with all he wrote about the Bible, but it does attempt to bring some of his lesser-known works into the discussion of his theology. An intensive examination of his principles also presents problems of great difficulty. The seminal concepts of his thinking are not easily identified, although several authors confidently claim to have isolated them. With respect to his interpretation of the New Testament, his concept of proclamation is one which ought to be in the center of the discussion, yet it is frequently ignored. However, the discussion is not closed, and will continue for a long time to come. In particular, his exegesis of the New Testament is a topic which needs further development: it is hoped that this study may open the subject a little; it certainly will not close the discussion. Ten volumes of his sermons constitute one section of his Collected Works, and other volumes contain such of his exegetical works as have been published, yet most discussions of his work do not even acknowledge this material in the bibliography.

The general question raised with respect to Schleiermacher’s thought concerns the relationship between his philosophy and theology, and the extent to which his true allegiance was given to each. Is his thought to be considered a contribution to the literature of the history of religion, or as a theology truly submissive to the message of Christian revelation? Is his system the development of a psychology of religion, or are its leading ideas theological in character, based on the gospel? Was Schleiermacher an artist of the romantic school who used biblical ideas to paint any picture he liked, with the same freedom as a painter of canvas, or was he an earnest preacher who sought to translate the gospel message into such terms that its challenge would be heard and acknowledged in nineteenth-century Germany? Is Schleiermacher’s religion simply the working out of his own feelings, or is it an expression of a genuine faith in Christ, in whom we meet God entirely outside of ourselves? Was Schleiermacher’s interpretation of the New Testament eisegesis, the arbitrary reading of his own ideas into the text of the Bible, or was it exegesis, the painstaking effort to read the New Testament in such a way that it truly expresses the word of God? These questions are not answered, for in the end the answer is beyond our judgment. Schleiermacher was deeply aware of these questions, and of the questionable nature of any attempt to use human speech with respect to God. He acknowledged that any theologian runs the risk of putting himself in the place of God. The question which is raised against his theology is the question raised against every other theologian’s system.

With particular reference to his biblical interpretation, the basic question is that which is raised about his whole system: Does his philosophical or his theological interest prevail? One form of the question concerns his differing treatment of the Old and New Testaments. It will be seen that Schleiermacher is unable to make any positive use of the Old Testament in his system of thought. The Old Testament is dismissed in Schleiermacher’s system as a relic of a more primitive age, retained for merely historical reasons, but of no more intrinsic importance than many works outside the canon. His view of the Old Testament depends, in part at least, on a concept of the developing “history of religions,” in which outmoded religious ideas are discarded with the advance of human progress. If this is really characteristic of his general idea of religious development, why does a similar procedure not obtain with respect to the New Testament and to Christ? Some interpreters think that the same principle does apply in both cases, and that further human advancement would mean for Schleiermacher that Christ himself had become outmoded. Schleiermacher denied this on numerous occasions, never more charmingly that in one of the sermons of his later years:

For a long time there has been a fable among men, and even in these days it is frequently heard. Absent faith has delighted in it, and weak faith has accepted it. It runs this way: A time is coming, perhaps it is here already, when even to this Jesus of Nazareth justice will be done. Each human memory is fruitful only for a certain time. The human race has much to thank him for...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Background
• Chapter 2: The Psychological Starting Point
• Chapter 3: Hermeneutics: Theory and Practice
• Chapter 4: The Gospels as History
• Chapter 5: The Use of the Old Testament
• Chapter 6: The Church as Interpreter
• Chapter 7: Some Remarks about Schleiermacher’s Exegesis
• Chapter 8: The Problem of Authority
• Conclusions
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2021
• Selected Bibliography